Translator's Introduction to Bones — Web Exclusive
By Brother Anthony of Taizé
Before the great Korean poet Kim Kwangkyu began his career as a writer, he worked as a translator, bringing poems by Bertold Brecht and Gilnter Eich into Korean. In fact, it might be tempting to ascribe the unusual forthrightness and clarity of Kim's poems to a German influence. Yet in the end, he stands out among Korean writers not because he eschews the onomatopoeia and grammatical incoherence typical of Korean poetry, but precisely because he doesn't belong to any obvious community or school. He is his own master and speaks in his own voice. The result is a poetry that is both powerful and universal.
As we begin to read Kim's work, a useful insigbt into his method may be found in the term "anatomy." The 17th-century English poet John Donne used this image to describe close scrutiny, corresponding to what people today often dauntingly call "analysis." Both terms are borrowed from the physical sciences; when chemists analyze, they break down a substance in order to describe its component elements. Donne's word "anatomize" was borrowed from medical science and suggests the systematic dissection of a dead body (Donne's stepfather was a doctor), but the work of the anatomist is not limited to the discovery of causes of death. Through autopsies, doctors discover the physical mechanics of our being, enabling others to find ways of restoring diseased bodies to health.
Kim Kwang-kyu has dissected his way through much diseased cultural tissue, and the body on his slab is modern society. In many poems we have a survey of its main pathologies, while in others we glimpse prescriptions and the possibility of healing—but then we read on and wonder if there can be any cure! And it is not possible to respond to this poetry from the sidelines; it only really works when we recognize ourselves in it.
Due to its unusual clarity and avoidance of wordplay. Kim's poetry is not difficult to translate. A critic once remarked that "the clear-sighted, meticulous sensitivity of a freshly wakened mind is one of the main qualities of Kim's writing." The poem "Bones" illustrates the critic's point. The glimpse of an X-ray of the narrator's thorax after some unspecified rib-cracking incident leads to a painfully honest confrontation with physical mortality: the transience to which a body made largely of dust is doomed. Kim further adds to the poem a very modern refutation of any metaphysical dimension that might allow a Platonizing escape into a platitude like, "the body dies, but not the soul." Kim Kwang-kyu is not a religious person in any doctrinal sense. Instead, he adopts a familiar theme from modern astrophysics to affirm that continuity comes only when the dust of one's bones, blessedly free from the memories of aches and pains, gets re-incorporated into other, later bodies.
Not consoling? Yet the tone ofthe poem is not glum or resentful. Transience, in Kirn's view, is the stuff of life. Every day you can see how "In the bustling market and streets, too, no one stays very long." What remains after we pass away is the wind that blows, as always, between trees that linger, though they too will soon be gone. The wind in Kim's poetry has its own, essential freedom, that of a quietly indifferent element that has no need of bone and body to make itself noticed. His treatment of wind is the nearest Kim will come to invoking any kind of religious dimension, perhaps in response to Jesus' words: "The wind blows where it wants to and you hear the sound, but cannot tell where it comes from, and where it's going: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit." But for Kim, as for so many, that "spirit" remains uncertain, nothing more than a possibility contained in the freedom of the air.
Brother Anthony of Taizé is an educator and translator of Korean literature who has lived in Seoul since 1980. He began to translate modern Korean literature in 1988, beginning with poems by Ku Sang. He has published 25 volumes of translations, and he has edited several anthologies of Korean literature. In October 2008 he was awarded the Ok-gwan (jade crown) Order of Merit for Culture (Munhwa Hunjang) by the Korean government. In September 2010 he was appointed a Chair-Professor at Dankook University.