The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry [Hardcover]

David McCann (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2004

Korea's modern poetry is filled with many different voices and styles, subjects and views, moves and countermoves, yet it still remains relatively unknown outside of Korea itself. This is in part because the Korean language, a rich medium for poetry, has been ranked among the most difficult for English speakers to learn. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry is the only up-to-date representative gathering of Korean poetry from the twentieth century in English, far more generous in its selection and material than previous anthologies. It presents 228 poems by 34 modern Korean poets, including renowned poets such as So Chongju and Kim Chiha.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Readers are going to be surprised, I think, by the richness and intensity and range of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry Though many U.S. soldiers lost their lives in the Korean War, and though our fates are profoundly intertwined with that of the Korean people, most Americans have not really taken in the history of that beautiful and riven country: the decades of a brutal Japanese occupation in the first half of the century, during which many aspects of Korean culture were suppressed, the years of WW II, the extraordinary violence and devastation of the Korean Civil War as it turned into a Cold War battlefield, the post-war struggle of the people of the south against their dictators, the explosive economic growth, the isolation of and continued tension with the North. Throughout these years, people lived lives, wrote poems, whoe literary movements, avant-gardes, people's poetries, folk poetries, underground and oppositional poetries, Buddhist and Christian poetries, appeared and disappeared, and some remarkable poets made poems from their century's violent requiem. Perhaps no American scholar other than David McCann could have found a way to tell the whole story in the way that this book does.

(Robert Hass Sept.-Dec. 2005)

McCann's fascinating tour... illuminat[es] the course of Korean poetry and the struggle of their modernization as a people.

(Sun Yung Shin Rain Taxi )

This anthology fills the last major hole for readers of East Asian literatures. His introduction and informative briefs on each poet are excellent...Essential.

(T. Carolan Choice )

With in such a time frame, we are very grateful to have more than a "taste".

(Bonnie R. Crown World Literature Today )

Review

Poets and poems too long unknown outside Korea arrive here in vivid English thanks to the dedication of Professor David McCann and a galaxy of other translators. The anthologist's work, 'searching for arrows shot at random,' in a phrase rendered from a poem by Chong Chiyong (1902-?), a poet who 'disappeared into the North,' has yielded a quiverful of sharp cries of pain, outrage, despair... and human warmth and courage. The poems range from tender expressions of sadness and love of country to experiments in the esthetics of disgust. These are the modern voices of an abused and divided land, one with an ancient and varied poetic tradition, and they deserve to be heard.

(Edwin A. Cranston

Edwin A. Cranston

Edwin A. Cranston, professor of Japanese literature, Harvard University )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (March 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231111282
• ISBN-13: 978-0231111287
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,102,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Woefully Incomplete, March 26, 2006

By 

April Wilson (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry (Paperback)

Although I believe McCann's anthology does give English-speaking
readers a glimpse into the richness of modern Korean poetry, I
could not have begun to understand the poetry without having taken a course at the University of Chicago in order to understand the myriad allusions in many of the poems. Although a brief biography of each poet was given, I longed to have more context. In many instances, although the poems were written by men, the narrators used a woman's voice, and this was not clear to me when I read the poems on my own.

I realize that translation of poetry is especially difficult, but I thought that many of the poems sounded stilted and could have been improved if a native English speaker had collaborated with the poems translated by Korean speakers. For example, one stanza of Chu Yohan's poem, "To Catch the Moon" is translated as follows:
One spring day to catch the moon
Climbing the night, I ascended the sky.
But the moon revealed only half its face:
"How would you have come if not for the dream?"
Moreover, after our class compared translations of the poems with
their originals, we were aware of different nuances that changed
the interpretation of the poems. Although Hwang Jiwoo's wonderful "Vanity Fair 1984" was translated well, considering its
extreme difficulty, the final line was translated: [Big Brother
saith] "Looks good to me!" Yet, in the original, there was an
obvious allusion to Genesis in which God looked at what he had
created and saw that it was good.

I think the anthology would have been far more valuable if it
had been presented in the manner that one finds translations of
South Asian poetry, especially by the late A.K. Ramanujan, in
which the translations are both smoother and more carefully
explained. However, I believe this volume is a good first start, and I hope that additional anthologies of Korean poets will follow.