Customer Reviews

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry

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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.