Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

Its local committee members

had to run away.

But they did not just run away

with eyes burning.

They took 150 people with them,

saying that they had to do night work at the aerodrome,

pushed them into air-raid shelters built by the Japanese army

near the end of the Japanese occupation.

The 150 were buried alive,

stabbed with bamboo spears

until their hearts leaped out,

stripped naked and raped,

beaten over the head

with stones.

They were pushed inside alive

and covered with earth.

In retribution against her right-wing father,

former head of the irrigation association,

they buried his lovely only daughter, Yi Jeong-sun,

after they had gang-raped her.

Pretty much a rotting corpse,

yet how peaceful

was her dead face, eyes so quietly shut,

how very peaceful.

About a year later,

the war was still far from over,

Yi Jeong-sun appeared in a dream to her friend Go Ok-hui

who lived in Okjeong-gol.

‘Ok-hui!

I’ve come back.

Our dog

used to leave marks of its journey

by pissing

as it followed mother across the fields.

I, too, left marks up there in heaven,

so I could come back now

without getting lost along the way.’

Go Ok-hui woke up and wept, alone. The first cock began to crow.

Her husband,

her tender-hearted,

slightly pockmarked,

generous-hearted husband,

was early requisitioned by the Japanese

as a labourer in the Pacific islands,

and never came back.

Field work and rice-paddy work, all was hers now.

Their older son grew up.

The younger one was born posthumously. He, too, grew up.

During the Korean War, the elder son joined the army

and never came back.

Nobody knew whether

he was alive or dead.

The younger boy, who had never seen his father,

went downtown

and on his way home,

though still only a lad,

got dragged off by the national defence corps.

It was talked of much later. Those were dark days.

She went out alone to weed the paddy field a second time

at the height of summer heat.

The sun beat down mercilessly

on the back of widow Mun of the Nampyeong family.

As Lao Tzu said:

Heaven is not benevolent.

Winter fields rest well.

If their owner is industrious

they are harrowed

then exposed to the icy wind,

and they rest well.

A notification of death-in-action arrived — a mimeographed form.

The box with the remains of their son,

staff sergeant Kim Seung-ho, did not arrive.

In that single day,

his father, Kim Chil-seong,

aged from fifty-one

to something like seventy.

Leaving his wife wailing and beating the floor.

he went out into the winter fields

alone.

There was nowhere to look. He smoked his third cigarette.

There is nothing but the Duman River

outside the town of Gyeongseong, North Hamgyeong province.

People sowed millet

in stony fields,

and it grew.

Despite the bitter cold

it managed to survive into the following spring.

On the day the one worm-eaten peach tree blossomed

the women smiled brightly.

The poor family of An Deok-su

lived on good terms with Bak Gi-jun’s family,

sharing a kitchen.

The two families

would cook together

and share the food.

On days when the two families quarrelled,

An Deok-su’s family

would cook first and eat,

after which Bak Gi-jun’s family

would prepare their meal and eat.

When An Deok-su’s daughter Il-sun

and Bak Gi-jun’s son Seong-ho

went into the willow grove on the sandbanks in the Duman River

and didn’t come back,

the two families went out to search for them.

They became in-laws.

Poverty divides people,

and it brings them together.

When reclaimed land is continually trodden down

it becomes firm.

About 3,000,000 people moved South;

more than 100,000 moved North.

Those 100,000 were welcomed splendidly.

But one by one they disappeared

until few remained.

The 3,000,000 who came South were like roots.

They kept saying

they were uprooted

but their roots went deep.

A home is a grave on a hill buried in the heart.

A home

is the memory of one who has left it behind.

A home exists in time.

That 10,000,000 families are divided between North and South

is one fact of modern Korea’s history.

It is not a past that we should go back to,

but the start of tomorrow.

I want to go back. I want to go back.

I want to go back to a home on the banks of the Duman River.

I want to go back to my home beside the Daedong River.

I want to ride a sleigh there.

Mother,

are you still alive?

There was one,

O Jong-cheol,

who did not linger in the past.

Born in Wonsan, South Hamgyeong Province,

he crossed the 38th Parallel southward shortly after Korea became independent.

He lived like a mole.

He lived as a penniless sluggard.

Then, reborn, he studied at an evening college,

set up a textile factory and

a leather goods factory.

He never once talked about home.

He bought a hill, bought vast rice fields

in Yeoju, Gyeonggi province.

He set up empty graves for three generations of his ancestors.

On the autumn harvest memorial day, they were his home village.

Time brings today and yesterday together.

Time brings here and there together.

Even long-lasting sorrow

cannot but be the veins of time.

His mother wore a black skirt and white blouse made of cotton.

She never wore any other clothes.

When she came home from the millet field

and removed the towel from her head, she was beautiful.

To the son

who left his mother

in a remote village in Uncheon, North Pyeongan province,

time meant here and there.

That image of his mother in black skirt and white blouse from fifty years ago

stuck with him, unchanging.

Kim Yeong-man, a sixteen-year-old in the People’s Army,

came down South from the North.

His battalion came down

as far as Yeosu

on the Southern Sea.

They crossed the Seomjin River

to attack Masan.

He soon forgot his familiar landscapes.

He was taken prisoner during the Masan assault.

In the prisoner-of-war camp on Geoje Island

fervent communist prisoners were fearless together.

The anti-communist prisoners began to gather separately.

Kim Yeong-Man

chose neither the North

nor the South,

but went to neutral India.

From India he went to Mexico.

From Mexico he and others went to Cuba.

In a slum alley in Havana’s old town

Ortega Kim

forgot every last word of Korean.

Only the image of his mother in black skirt and white blouse

hung hazily above his eyebrows.

Born in 1872, died in 1933.

Born in Seokbo, Yeongyang, North Gyeongsang province,

she married at nineteen.

Her husband, Kim Yeong-ju,

was killed fighting in Kim Do-hyeon’s righteous army.

She remained with her husband’s family

bringing up his posthumous child.

When the Independence Movement started in 1919,