Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

Young Hong Sa-jun’s novel The Deer

was idolised as a model of proletarian literature.

Writers who came down to Seoul

such as An Hui-nam,

Yi Won-jo,

Yi Gi-yeong,

Bak Tae-won encouraged him, one after another.

On their recommendation

he enjoyed the honor of visiting Pyongyang.

In August 1950

he returned from his visit to Pyongyang.

He turned from being a leftist to a rightist.

Pyongyang had disillusioned him.

I am a rightist.

I saw the reality of Pyongyang.

Tell everyone

that I am a rightist.

I curse what lies beyond the 38th parallel.

After Seoul was recaptured he was arrested as a traitor.

To save him, the writer Kim Dong-ni

visited the police and the prosecutors.

When Hong Sa-jun was imprisoned,

fearful, apprehensive,

he resolved to escape.

While attempting to escape he was killed. He was like a drop of dew.

If he had only held on a little longer,

he would have been released

after investigation.

His writing would have bloomed to the fullest.

After all, the poet No Cheon-myeong, who ran wild under the communists,

she was released.

His Japanese wife died.

Love lost.

Alone he moulded clay

chiseled stone.

The sculptor Gwon Jin-gyu

had a room in Donam-dong, Seoul.

The sculptures were quite at home.

The sculptor

was a guest squatting on the edge of a camp bed in a corner.

One clay figure breathing.

One sculptor gasping.

It seems there are cliffs in art.

Failing to avoid the cliff,

he walked over the edge

and after that, there was nothing.

He ended his life.

Not because he hated the world

Not because he hated himself.

Because art had been driven out.

In the winter of 1953

Jiri Mountain was the main objective.

The path to Jiri Mountain crosses many steep mountains.

The Imsil contingent found itself scattered all over the ridges

when it got cut off from the main battleline.

News came that the guerilla unit in Huimun Mountain had been annihilated.

Feet were heavy as they marched on by night.

The Jiri Mountain contingent

were sure to be attacked by the expeditionary forces.

Where could the sixth division of the 102nd guards’ battalion be?

They too must have been attacked.

Each evening they cut arrowroot vines and plaited shelters,

with pine branches to form a roof.

Mount Jang-an was full of expeditionary forces.

Night fell.

Flashlights were moving upward.

The lights of the expeditionary forces.

They ran madly, walked, crawled.

They wedged themselves under rocks.

Nearby

two people were holding their breath and trembling.

In the falling snow

those two were comrades:

a woman member of the contingent, Gang Sun-ok

and a straggler from the People’s Army, Jang Gwan-ho.

Where had the other members of the contingent gone?

We’ve fallen into those bastards’ trap.

It would be a waste of energy

to go on wandering.

Let’s see what things are like here.

Sleep overcame them.

A loudspeaker rang out from below:

You’re surrounded.

Come out quietly with your hands up.

Let yourselves be embraced by the Republic of Korea.

They heard it in their sleep

as day broke.

The two were found lying side by side.

Their hands were blue with frostbite.

Barefoot, for they had taken the wrappings off their feet.

Locked in a tight embrace, they did not move.

Soldiers shook them

but they did not budge.

They had frozen to death in the night.

That girl from the South, Gang Sun-ok,

and the man from the North

must have fallen in love on their march over the mountains.

Loving

then dying,

no rancour remains.

They were not far from the secret hideout.

Unable to make it there

and dying,

no rancour remains.

There were almost no young men left in Jeju Island.

They had all been drafted into the army,

or sent to distant coal mines,

or conscripted to fight in the South Sea Islands.

From every seaside village

twenty

or thirty

had gone off en masse .

In one village

twenty-five gone off

between the ages of eighteen and thirty left.

The girls left to be comfort women.

Once they left

after a couple of postcards

there was no more news.

At the end of the Japanese occupation,

even the houses were requisitioned for the military,

the harvested grain taken to feed the army.

Those remaining,

between the ages of fourteen

and seventy were mobilised.

In the days of forced labour

one or two hundred

were forced to work in canteens.

When Japan surrendered,

some three hundred corpses

were piled up at the workplaces.

Such was Liberation.

Such was Jeju Island at Liberation.

Half the young folk who had been taken away

didn’t come back.

Those who came back

were injured,

were invalids.

A few lights floated on the sea at night

from boats fishing for hairtail.

Im Gyeong-bok

of Bonggae-dong in the hilly regions of Jeju Island

could not find the body of his father Im Chang-ho.

He searched three different forced-labour camps

but could not locate his father’s body

among the corpses.

Weeping bitterly

he burned a set of his father’s clothes

and put the ashes

into the grave mound for his father.

That was on August 17, 1945,

two days after Liberation.

He chose August 15,

Liberation Day,

as his father’s death anniversary day.

‘Father!

Father!’

Returning home

after building the grave mound

he called out toward the horizon.

‘Father!’

That night in a dream

his father came back in a boat.

Queen Min, who stood up to the Daewon-gun, her father-in-law,

was a fearsome woman.

On the faces of the court ladies

who slept with her husband King Gojong

she inflicted all kinds of scars,

and added all kinds of harsh punishments.

She was murdered one night by a band of Japanese thugs.

Her dead body was burned,

became a handful of bones

that someone secretly buried.

Later, the Lady Eom,

who had kept her distance from Queen Min, was called

to be the recipient of Gojong’s love.

Lady Eom was benevolent.

The courtiers felt relieved at last.

This wise queen,

separately from the schools of the foreign missionaries

founded Yanjeong School,

Jinmyeong Ladies’ School,

Sukmyeong Ladies’ School with money from the privy purse

and her own resources.

Yangjeong School offered traditional education,

Jinmyeong and Sukmyeong aimed at modern education.

In the end her son Eun, known as King Yeongchin,

was sent away to Japan as a hostage at the age of eleven.

His royal father

and royal mother were broken-hearted.

His royal father

inscribed for him the character ‘endure’.

His mother, the Lady Eom, died of typhoid fever

before ever seeing again the Crown Prince, her only son.

During the war, people were less than animals.