Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

Its master, Kim Jeong-hui,

got more than a little drunk,

wept,

buried the inkstone

and performed memorial rites before its grave

the following year.

‘You left this world ahead of me.’

In the Joseon Era, women had no names.

One girl from the Hong family

was adopted as Emperor Gojong’s niece.

Her lips were red as well-ripened boxthorn berries.

The girl grew up

and became the wife of Yi Ji-yong

who was leaving for Japan as Special Envoy;

She accompanied him using the name Gyeong.

She adopted her husband’s family name Yi

so she was known as Yi Gyeong.

Her flesh was like white jade,

her teeth like snowy jade

so she was called Yi Ok-gyeong.

Ok means ‘jade’.

Once in Japan, on receiving a bribe of ten thousand yen

her husband signed the Korea-Japan Protocol,

then concluded the Offensive-Defensive Alliance for the Russo-Japanese War,

allowing the Japanese to use Korea as a military base.

In reality, the whole of Yongsan in Seoul,

some 940 acres,

had served as a base for foreign forces

ever since Japanese forces captured it

during the Imjin invasion of the 1590s.

Finally Korea fell to Japan.

Even a gisaeng such as Sanhong refused

to become a concubine of one of the five ministers

who betrayed the nation,

saying that although she was a gisaeng

she could never live as the concubine of such a man.

Yi Ok-gyeong, however,

not content with her husband,

had relations with the officials of the Japanese legation:

Hakihara

Kuniwake

Hasegawa.

Her domestic servants used to take her photo

and thrust at the crotch with a stick,

saying, This is a hole for Japs.

A hole for Japs.

Reading the Maecheon Yarok *

I lingered a moment at this part.

* Maecheon was Hwang Hyeon’s pen-name, Yarok means ‘an unofficial history’. Hwang Hyeon later committed suicide when Joseon fell to Japan.

A young woman like very fresh young greens,

like young greens

newly washed three times in a flowing stream,

one such young woman,

having dropped out of middle school,

came and sat down in the chilly office

of the Cheongju Urban Industrial Mission.

The room grew even quieter.

Her job was to help a pastor

as bland as long-stored buckwheat jelly

or cold bean curd.

No end in sight once over the edge of the cliff.

Endless days of service.

On her face clean like young greens

appeared a freckle then another and another

like birds singing early in the morning

keeping each other company.

Writing petitions,

writing letters of complaint,

copying out manifestos,

drawing up agreements,

she also had to make visits here and there,

taking long-distance buses over bumpy, dusty roads.

With her face, which never knew make-up,

she devoted all her youth to service

and her laugh was always as it had been

a thousand years before.

No need to know her name.

He has no shoulders.

Shoulderless, he sits

on a rocky ridge in Geumho-dong.

He gazes across the river

at the newly erected apartments in Apgujeong-dong.

Talking nonsense is his job.

Once evening comes,

the lights in the apartments across the river shine bright.

He gazes across at those lights.

He tries to rise,

but his legs have grown stiff, so he has to sit down again

on rocks that have neither blood

nor tears.

An out-of-season mosquito whines

but it has no strength to bite

and he has no blood to suck.

The two of them are in the same state,

Kim of Geumho-dong and the mosquito.

However,

Kim’s son

has the best shoulders in Geumho-dong,

a young tough who gives petty thieves a hard time.

Nothing like his father. Nothing.

He was first to be given a posthumous name, Jijeung.

He was first to be given the title Wang (King)

instead of Maripgan .

Jicheollo, the 22nd king of Silla,

had Kim as his family name;

his given name was Jidaero or Jidoro.

This king’s prick was said to be well over one foot long.

Unmarried,

he sent agents all over the country

to find him a wife.

At the foot of an old tree in Muryangbu

two dogs

were fighting and biting each other

over a gigantic turd the size of a big drum.

The agents wanted to know whose it was.

They discovered that one village girl

had produced it in the woods

while doing the washing.

As might be expected, that girl was over seven feet high.

She became the wife

of the bachelor king,

a heaven-sent spouse.

The candle was never put out

night after night.

They had two sons

and son Beopheung inherited the throne.

King Beopheung

and his queen both became monks.

A broad-minded fellow

travelling through Manchuria during Japanese rule,

one day he heard the Diamond Sutra being chanted

and became a monk.

Forming an association with other monks,

such as Cheongdam, Seongcheol, Hyanggok,

he sat in the full lotus position

in Bongam-sa temple in Mungyeong,

not lying down to sleep.

With his tall stature he played a major role

in founding the Jogye Order,

then he withdrew into the mountains.

No brilliant poems,

no dazzling sermons.

He simply sat unspeaking, keeping his mind focused,

inside the sound of the wind among Mount Toham’s pines,

yesterday,

today,

tomorrow.

Sat upright,

back sheerer than a cliff,

stunning.

Everything was in decline.

All the lights were going out,

no way things could be put right.

So King Gyeongmyeong in the last stages of Silla

had nothing to do but sit and drink.

Earlier, a dog in a wall painting in the Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings barked.

Monks recited sutras

but again it barked.

Then the bow-strings of the five guardians in the temple snapped.

The dog jumped out of the wall painting, barked,

jumped back into the painting.

The seven years of King Gyeongmyeong,

the three years of King Gyeongae

were years of collapse and nothing else.

King Gyeongmyeong asked, Am I a king or a scarecrow?

Drunk,

he took off his heavy crown

and gaped at Mount Namsan in the distance,

which came into sight then disappeared

At night his only care was for one lady of the court, a newcomer.

Among the eighteen sons of King Sejong the Great of the Joseon era,

the fifth, Prince Gwangpyeong,

like his father

mastered the Chinese classics by fifteen,

music and mathematics, too,

but died at the age of twenty.

The son he had fathered likewise died young.

Yi Won-hu, the sixth generation descendant of Prince Gwangpyeong,

married at fifteen,

and in addition to his wife,

so also his mother-in-law,

his grandmother-in-law,

great-grandmother-in-law were all widowed young.