The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry / Edition 1

Poets and poems too long unknown outside Korea arrive here in vivid English thanks to the dedication of Professor David McCann and a galaxy of other translators. The anthologist's work, 'searching for arrows shot at random,' in a phrase rendered from a poem by Chong Chiyong (1902-?), a poet who 'disappeared into the North,' has yielded a quiverful of sharp cries of pain, outrage, despair... and human warmth and courage. The poems range from tender expressions of sadness and love of country to experiments in the esthetics of disgust. These are the modern voices of an abused and divided land, one with an ancient and varied poetic tradition, and they deserve to be heard.

Readers are going to be surprised, I think, by the richness and intensity and range of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry Though many U.S. soldiers lost their lives in the Korean War, and though our fates are profoundly intertwined with that of the Korean people, most Americans have not really taken in the history of that beautiful and riven country: the decades of a brutal Japanese occupation in the first half of the century, during which many aspects of Korean culture were suppressed, the years of WW II, the extraordinary violence and devastation of the Korean Civil War as it turned into a Cold War battlefield, the post-war struggle of the people of the south against their dictators, the explosive economic growth, the isolation of and continued tension with the North. Throughout these years, people lived lives, wrote poems, whoe literary movements, avant-gardes, people's poetries, folk poetries, underground and oppositional poetries, Buddhist and Christian poetries, appeared and disappeared, and some remarkable poets made poems from their century's violent requiem. Perhaps no American scholar other than David McCann could have found a way to tell the whole story in the way that this book does.

Poets and poems too long unknown outside Korea arrive here in vivid English thanks to the dedication of Professor David McCann and a galaxy of other translators. The anthologist's work, 'searching for arrows shot at random,' in a phrase rendered from a poem by Chong Chiyong (1902-?), a poet who 'disappeared into the North,' has yielded a quiverful of sharp cries of pain, outrage, despair... and human warmth and courage. The poems range from tender expressions of sadness and love of country to experiments in the esthetics of disgust. These are the modern voices of an abused and divided land, one with an ancient and varied poetic tradition, and they deserve to be heard.

David McCann speaks of the powerful spell Kim Sowol's poem 'Azaleas' cast, and how it survives as a touchstone of the "resigned sadness of the Korean people." He notes that few Americans could spontaneously recite a comparable poem. In a nation cleft by war, these poets have transcended censorship and other oppression, violent turns of history, famine and other hardships, and wrested from these conditions a dazzling effusion of talent and truth-telling as 'poets of the South, poets of the North,/ run/ from death and deceit.' The poems range in tone and outlook from imagistic and meditative to today's rather surreal language poetry, an impressive variety despite the great body of shared traditions and aesthetics. These texts will stimulate interest in Korean literature and inspire recordings of the original poems.

— David Ray, poet and author of The Maharani's New Wall

This is an anthology we have been waiting for, a welcome teaching source for instructors and a necessary reader for students of modern Korean poetry.

— Ann Choi, assistant professor of Asian languages and cultures, Rutgers University