Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

When people buy dried fish from the Generalissima

for their family memorial rites,

their ancestors’ appetites are aroused.

Since the 1970s, cocks seem to crow any time they want,

so the spirits of ancestors can’t make out

when exactly it’s time to leave;

it’s only right, then, that their descendants

should at least arouse their appetites.

‘I hate that song most, “The dawn bell has rung…”

the Saemaeul Song,* I hate that most.’

There was a time you had to be ready to be arrested

if you said something like that.

Even speaking such words took too long.

Such is the dawdling dialect of Chungcheong province.

It’s not just in speaking.

Rising

from sitting

takes a long, long time, too.

When they go to Seoul from Daejeon station

they are sure to take the slow train,

which stops at every station,

at every station.

‘What would I take

a fast train for?’

When they cross the street,

they slowly start to cross

after coughing three or four times

long after all the other people have crossed.

If a companion urges them on:

‘What do you hurry for

so much?

If you hurry, even the rice isn’t properly cooked.

‘Look at the moon

at night.

It moves

slowly,

slowly,

as if not moving at all.

‘If we live by minutes and seconds, we’re done for.

It’s the same with living by hours.

‘Therefore we must have

a night

like half a day, like

early evening,

night,

and early dawn

when the cockerel comes late to the first flap of its wings.

What are you thinking?’

* Song of the New Village (Saemaeul) Movement during the Park Jung-hee era.

Tapgol Park,

a place crowded with elderly folk,

where old men

covered in age spots

grab one another by the collar and sort of fight,

ah!.. there he is.

Mansu Coffee Shop

on a side-street in Cheongjin-dong, Seoul,

a place crowded with elderly folk

…there he is.

A place where the elderly roll walnuts in their palms,

sinews squirming on the backs of their hands,

a place where they talk about everything,

shouting this

and that,

and pinch the buttocks of the girl serving coffee,

…there he is.

He’s a young man of thirty,

but when asked why he comes here

he says it’s the only place he feels comfortable;

when asked his age,

he says he’s sixty-five.

They say he was forced to do military service

after he lied about his age,

and his mind was affected

after a beating by a superior in the barracks,

so he was discharged on medical grounds,

and mentally he is old and mad.

Could be so:

the Tang genius, the poet Li Ho, wrote that

at twenty a man is already old.

The father, Shin Gil-ho was 51,

the son, Shin Haeng-bok, 26.

The father had six convictions for larceny,

the son had four convictions for larceny.

In prison, a convict who is penniless is known as dog hair ,

while one who cashes promissory notes

or cheques is called tiger hair .

Dog-hair father and son

were assigned to different cells,

but after supper,

with difficulty, they communicated

through a little barred window in the back.

From the father’s third theft

the son

had followed in his father’s footsteps.

What they said:

Did you eat enough?

Yes, Dad.

Rub the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet a lot.

And don’t skip rubdowns with a cold towel.

Yes, all right, son.

The father, with his shining, prematurely bald head,

murmured to himself:

My boy, I know nothing else about him,

but he’s the most filial son in the country.

Moving secretly through many parts of China,

he devoted himself to the independence movement in his fatherland.

Along with his devotion and tenacity, he was cautious,

so he survived and came back home.

Even back home, prison was his politics.

His fatherland,

the Korean peninsula

where the sea on three sides can never be calm,

was always the land he dreamed of.

He passed fifty,

sixty,

seventy.

With reality so bleak, even dreaming was hard.

He rejected all honors.

Belief was his only politics.

Even a 40-watt light in a dreary cell

was an utterly vain dream to him

each day when he awoke.

He was no reality, he was a legend.

As if modern history were ancient history,

Jeong Hwa-am endured, white-haired.

I have three surnames.

In this land

where changing surnames is one of the greatest humiliations,

I have three or four surnames.

In Japan there is a surname Gui,

meaning ghost,

often therefore changed into the wife’s family name.

My case has nothing to do with such customs.

However, my family name can be Kim,

or Nam

or sometimes Jang.

Yet I am no swindler.

Not content with those names, anyway,

I adopt my mother’s surname Ko

and am sometimes called Ko.

Once I got dreadfully drunk

and fell into an old-style latrine,

after which I was Bun,

meaning Shit.

Until the 1970s, some eccentrics from the late Joseon period

continued to live with various names like this,

which meant that life was never boring.

My family name was Shit.

Jin Dal-ho

was a man with plans, great or shaky,

who sold his lands in Jeong-eup in North Jeolla

and came up to Seoul.

Though born to the fields,

his body as a whole

was in good shape,

no need for a carpenter to ply his inked cord.

His lips were always fresh,

and when he washed up in the morning

he never gave a damn about others in the queue.

He washed his neck,

behind his ears, beneath his ears,

the ridge of his nose,

even his chest beneath his undervest, two or three times.

He soaped for a long time,

and rinsed off the foam for a long time, too.

Only then did he say: Now I feel alive, I can enjoy my food.

Yet day after day nothing worked out

and he stayed at the Dabok Inn as a long-term guest

for over a year.

His notebook held

the President’s phone number,

some National Assemblyman’s phone number,

even the switchboard at Midopa department store,

each compactly set down,

but day after day nothing worked out.

All he could manage was

to seduce the woman working at the inn

and make love to her at night.

In Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province,

nobody cared about the Yushin Reforms or anything else.

There was one man who took care of all the village’s unpleasant jobs

such as renting a room for gamblers,

laying out the body if someone died,

castrating a pig,

mating cows or horses.

That was No Bong-gu.

So poor that the roof of his house rotted into furrows,

but always warm-hearted

like the fire in a brazier.

In the winter when it was too cold to move,

and children walked with short, quick steps,