Essays
Ko Un's Ten Thousand Lives
Jeffery
Beam
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Ten Thousand
Lives. Ko Un. Green Integer, 2005. 364 pages,
$14.95 (paperback). ISBN: 1933382066
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This remarkable volume selects from the first ten volumes (there
are now 23) of the South Korean former Buddhist monk's life time
project to describe every person he has ever known through poetry.
Imprisoned during the Korean War, beaten by police, tortured by
having acid poured into his ears, and imprisoned four times during
South Korean's democracy movement, Un is Korea's greatest living
poet, assumed to one day win a Nobel Prize, and a leading figure in
Korean politics and culture.
Robert Haas in his superlative introduction to this volume which
places Un in world literature describes how Un, while in prison
facing a 20-year sentence that began in 1980, in pitch-dark solitary
confinement, conceived of this project. Released in 1982 as a result
of a general pardon, he has continued to compose the Lives,
but also translations, a narrative poem, novels, criticism, and
small Zen Buddhist poems. In 1999, I reviewed Un's book of Korean
poems, Beyond Self, here.
No one, from village water carriers to fellow prisoners, to
former president Kim Dae-jung, is exempt from Un's loving eye, and
as to be expected he finds the core of goodness in each of his
subjects with a bracing wit and lucidity. Here's one poem:
In early morning Pun-im carries two buckets of
water
on a yoke, her face bowed toward the ground,
Pun-im
with her eyelashes so long.
Pun-im. There's no way of
knowing what she's achieving
ten fathoms down deep in her
heart,
as the hem of her black skirt soaks up the dew
and
below it her busy feet soak it up too.
Pun-im, who never
loses a drop from her water buckets.