azaleas
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aza lea s
a b o o k of p oe m s
k i m s o w ŏ l
Translated, with an introduction, by
dav i d r . m c c a n n
c olu m bi a u n i v e r si t y p r e s s n e w yor k
This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead
Publication Fund of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
This book is published with the support of the Sunshik Min Endowment
for the Advancement of Korean Literature, Korea Institute, Harvard
University.
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
new york chichester, west sussex
Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kim, SowQl, 1903–1934.
[Chindallekkot. English]
Azaleas : a book of poems / Kim SowQl ; translated, with an introduction, by
David R. McCann.
p. cm. — (Weatherhead books on Asia)
isbn 0-231-13972-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-231-13973-x (pbk.)
isbn 0-231-51145-0 (electronic)
1. Kim, SowQl, 1903–1934—Translations into English. I. McCann, David R.
(David Richard), 1944– II. Title. III. Series.
pl991.415.c5c513 2007
895.7'13—dc22
2006029591
8
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and
durable acid-free paper.
Designed by Chang Jae Lee
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Fleurs de la Montagne
Fleurs sur la montagne fleurissent,
Les fleurs fleurissent.
Automne, printemps, été jusqu’à la fin
Les fleurs fleurissent.
Haut sur la montagne,
Là-haut sur la montagne
Les fleurs sont fleurissantes
Si éloignées, si loin.
Un petit oiseau
Haut sur la montagne chante.
Ami des fleurs,
Sur la montagne il demeure.
Fleurs sur la montagne
Tombent, fleurs se laissent tomber.
Printemps, été, automne jusqu’à la fin
Les fleurs tombent.
Translation of “Flowers of the Mountain” in loving memory of
Helen Louise Summer McCann (1917–2006)
by her husband, Richard V. E. McCann
c on t e n t s
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Sowŏl’s Poetry and Place in Korean Literature 1
1. For My Love
Someday Long After 15
Plucking Grass 16
The Sea 17
On the Mountain 18
The Old Stories 19
Love’s Song 20
Untitled 21
Love’s Words 22
For My Love 23
On a Dry Riverbank 24
2.Spring Night
Spring Night 27
Night 28
Long Ago in a Dream 29
One Who Came in a Dream 30
3.Two People
Snowy Evening 33
Purple Cloud 34
Two People 35
viii c o n t e n t s
Cock’s Crow 36
Unforgettable 37
I Did Not Really Know Before 38
Sleeping or Waking, Sitting or Standing 39
Though the Sun Is Sinking at the Mountain Crest 40
4.No One Lone Mountain
Dream 43
Day of Worries 44
Sky’s Edge 45
Ant 46
Swallow 47
Owl 48
The Great Wall 49
Buds 50
5.One Time, One Time
Cigarettes 53
Untitled 54
Mom and Dad 55
Parents 56
Remarried 57
Lost Heart 58
Spring Rain 59
Silken Mists 60
Memory 61
Impatient Love 62
Terrible Dream 63
Dream Visit 64
Woman’s Scent 65
Powdered Face 66
Wife’s Body 67
Seoul Night 68
6.Half-Moon
Autumn Morning 71
Autumn Evening 72
Half-Moon 73
c o n t e n t s ix
7. The Cricket
This Thought of Meeting 77
Familiar Faces 78
Deeply Held Belief 79
Dream 80
Sweethearts and Friends 81
Paper Kite 82
Falling Snow 83
Lump of Grief 84
Optimism 85
Wind and Spring 86
Snow 87
Pledge Deep as Deep 88
Red Tide 89
Some Other Country’s Land 90
Thousand, Ten Thousand Ri 91
Life and Death 92
Fisherman 93
Cricket 94
Moon Color 95
8.If the Seacoast Changed to a Mulberry Grove
If It Wasn’t for Bad Luck . . . 99
If the Seacoast Changed to a Mulberry Grove 100
Wax Candle Lamp 101
Should We Just Say Whatever Words Are in Our
Minds 102
A Later Day 103
Man and Wife 104
My House 105
Dawn 106
Cloud 107
9. Summer’s Moon
Summer’s Moon 111
Approach of Spring 114
Water Plants 116
c o n t e n t s
10. Forsaken
Our House 121
Picnic 122
Forsaken 123
Solemnity 124
Only Think, If We Had Our Land, Our Own to
Plow 125
By the Furrow 126
Evening 127
Hands Together 128
Meditation 129
11. Alone
Delight 133
Grave 134
Prayerful Spirit 135
Cold Evening 136
Invocation 137
12. Loneliness of the Journey
Loneliness of the Journey 1 141
Loneliness of the Journey 2 142
13. Azaleas
Song of the Stream 145
Road 146
Stream 147
Road Away 148
Wangsimni 149
Mandarin Duck Pillow 150
Detachment 151
Mountain 152
Azaleas 153
Sakchu KusQng 154
Seesaw 155
Ch’unhyang and Yi ToryQng 156
Cuckoo 157
c o n t e n t s xi
Thought of Home 158
Flowers of the Mountain 159
14. Lighting the Flower Lamp at Night
Lighting the Flower Lamp at Night 163
Riches and Honor, Wealth and Fame 164
Repentance 165
Insincerity 166
Dream Path 167
Human Beings Live to Die 168
Right to Seek to Die 169
Hope 170
Panoramic 171
I Have Lived Not Knowing Life at All 172
15.Golden Meadow
Golden Meadow 175
River Village 176
First Skirt 177
New Moon Celebration 178
O Mother, O Sister 179
16.Rooster Cock-a-Doodle-Doo
Rooster Cock-a-Doodle-Doo 183
fterword: Remembrance of Sowŏl
A
Kim Ŏk 185
ac k now l e d gm e n t s
I have used primarily two sources for the translations in this
collection: Kim Yongjik’s Kim Sowŏl chŏnjip (Complete Works
of Kim Sowŏl), published by Seoul National University Press
in 2001, and an unpublished edition by my friend and colleague Professor KwQn YQngmin. I am grateful for KwQn
YQng­min’s advice, learning, and friendship over the years, as
I am to so many others, from riders met on trains between
Andong and Seoul in the 1960s to students, colleagues, and
others who have not only endured my questions and my enthusiasm about SowQl, his poetry, and his times, but also provided information and encouragement.
I wish to formally express my gratitude for a translation
grant from the International Communication Foundation,
which helped me keep going with the project during a difficult passage. I was able to explore some of the ideas for the
introduction at the University of California at Berkeley in
presenting the 2004 Tompkins Lecture, and at the University of
Washington that same year in the Andrew W. Markus ­Lecture;
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity and the response.
My special thanks to Professor Jiwon Shin at the University of
California and Professor Scott Swaner at the University of
Washington. My thanks also to Young-Jun Lee and to Jung Ja
Choi for their patient help with the manuscript and for their
suggestions about ways to improve it.
My deepest thanks go to my wife, Ann, who was there in
Korea at the beginning of this project and with me ever since.
azaleas
i n t rodu c t ion
s owŏ l’s p oe t ry a n d pl ac e
i n kor e a n l i t e r at u r e
Kim ChQngsik, known by the sobriquet SowQl (White Moon),
lived for only thirty-two years (1902–1934) and published but
one book of poems, Azaleas (Chindallaekkot, 1925), yet he
­became one of twentieth-century Korea’s most beloved and
well-known poets. Editions of his collected poems have been
published in great numbers, especially during the 1960s and
1970s, when his works were made part of the middle- and
high-school curricula, at least in South Korea. During the
1980s, a period of intense focus in literary and intellectual
circles on the social and political role of the writer, SowQl was
criticized for having failed to engage the social and political
issues of his day, notably including the complex nexus of the
Japanese colonial occupation of Korea (1910–1945). A more
balanced view of his life and work has emerged since the 1980s,
which takes special note of his extraordinary control of the
expressive capabilities of the Korean language in his works;
his deft appropriation of folk-song images, tonalities, and
rhythmic forms; and his still elusive qualities as an early Korean modernist poet.
SowQl’s popular following remains strong. In 2002, when
Siin segye (Poet’s World ) conducted a readers’ poll to identify
Korea’s favorite poets of the past one hundred years, SowQl
topped the list. SowQl’s best-known poem, “Azaleas,” has appeared over the years in several song versions, and in 2002 it
was performed by the Korean rock group Novasonic on their
compact disc Remastering. In 2003, the singer Maya included
her own version on Born to Do It.
i n t r o d u c t i o n
The greater part of Korean scholarship and critical writ­
ing on SowQl has tended to focus on the ten or dozen of his
poems most widely known through their presentation in Korean textbooks. They are wonderful poems, to be sure; but
Azaleas as a whole is left standing more as a monument, the
place where the original versions of the well-known poems
are interred, than as a book to be read in its entirety. Among
other things, this has meant that any given poem is not read
against other poems, while the entire collection is not read as
a work in its own right. This abbreviated reading practice
may account, in turn, for the persistence of the summary assessment of SowQl as a folk-song poet, focusing as it does on
the poems that fit the characterization while ignoring the labor as well as the varied materials of the remaining hundred
or more poems that constitute the book.
Azaleas is a big collection of poems. In customary practice, a
book of poems might contain forty or perhaps fifty pieces. This
does not mean that larger numbers of poems or lines make a
poem project great. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, to which Eliot
added an extensive notes section so that the publisher would
consider it worth doing as a book, was still shorter than twenty
pages.1 But there are 127 poems in Azaleas, arranged in sixteen
discrete sections. One, “The Cricket,” contains nineteen poems,
twelve of which are of four lines or fewer. The three poems in
“Summer’s Moon,” though, are forty-eight, twenty-four, and
thirty-two lines in length. Thematic arrangements also seem to
be at play, with, for example, recurrent sequences of disturb­
ing dream images, or the death images in the section “Alone”
leading to the extraordinary “Invocation,” one of SowQl’s bestknown works. The “Azaleas” section is its own tour de force,
in three dimensions: it contains several of the best known of
SowQl’s works and most famous of all twentieth-century Korean poems, “Road Away,” “Wangsimni,” “Azaleas,” “Sakchu
KusQng,” “Cuckoo,” and “Flowers of the Mountain”; it moves
within a controlled environment from one poem to the next;
and it argues, by its clearly palpable structuring, for an alertness, in reading the other poems in the book, to the overall
structure, argument, and plot of the whole.
s o w ŏl’s p o e t r y a n d p l a c e i n k o r e a n l i t e r a t u r e Azaleas tells a story. A series of juxtaposed images and an
array of voices combine to bring a young Korean writer from
the more northern, P’yQngyang area into the modern literary
world of Seoul, the cosmopolitan capital of Korea. What he
did when he left the north, then while he stayed in or around
Seoul for two years as a student and writer, and under what
terms he left it to return to the north constitute the story of
this book, one that has always seemed to me to deserve to be
encountered as a whole.
What will today’s reader make of it? I find a close literary
resemblance to Rimbaud and his “Le bateau ivre,” that long,
brilliant poem about throwing loose the lines and sailing
down the river and away; but also a biographical mirroring
between two poets who wrote youthfully and brilliantly, then
gave it all up and walked off, Rimbaud to Africa and his series
of failed business enterprises and collapsing health, SowQl
back to the region near P’yQngyang that he had left earlier, to
a job as a regional newspaper distributor and a life descending
into depression, drink, and an early death, perhaps deliberate,
from an overdose of opium.
What story will readers find in this English-language version of Azaleas? Whatever that turns out to be, by encountering the entire work in English outside the Korean national
narratives of any particular poem’s meaning, readers will have
made something entirely new of SowQl and his work: a writer
of the twenty-first-century literary world.
Kim Kijin, a leader of the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation (KAPF) in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote of SowQl’s poetry
that there was little to recommend it beyond a certain charm
of expression in the folk-song style. 2 For Kim Kijin, any poet
not fully committed to KAPF’s programmatic and didactic
goals had significance only for examples of the sorts of literary work that Korean readers should avoid. Published in
KaebyQk (Creation), the leading literary and intellectual journal of the day, where SowQl, as it happened, had also published many of his poems, Kim Kijin’s critique is historically
bound to the period of the 1920s in Korea, yet it stubbornly
i n t r o d u c t i o n
persists as a lingering critical gesture. A History of Korean Literature, published in 2003, states the charge as follows: “Kim
[SowQl] . . . seldom took firm hold of contemporary life.”3 A
study of the North Korean literary reception of SowQl offers a
variation on this theme. P’yŏngyang e p’in chindallaekkot (An
Azalea That Bloomed in P’yQngyang), a gathering of North Korean responses to SowQl and his work, notes the overly personal, bourgeois sentimentality of the poems, contrasting it
with a more public, Korean nationalist sentiment. 4
I was forcefully reminded of the official assessment in the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea of SowQl’s limits as
a poet when a government guide, named Kim ChQngsik—
­coincidentally, SowQl’s full name—repeatedly, though in the
main good-naturedly, hectored me in the course of a week­
long visit to P’yQngyang, Hamh]ng, and WQnsan about my
professed interest in SowQl’s work. Doubly ironic, then, was
my discovery of the scene in a North Korean television drama
series about KAPF in which two of the lead characters stand
on the shore of a lake while one, the man, gravely recites the
refrain from SowQl’s poem “Cuckoo” (ChQpdongsae): “ChQp­
dong, chQpdong, a’uraebi chQpdong . . . ”5
Korean literary history has shown a similar disposition toward reducing SowQl’s work to its simplest components. A
History of Korean Literature characterizes SowQl’s appeal in
the following terms:
little specificity of plot. . . . Images [that] are com­mon­
place, and . . . used to exploit stock responses. The poems
offer conventional feelings about the sorrow of love, and
this calculated indeterminacy, a characteristic of folk
song, contributes to their popularity. . . . Simple diction,
subtle versification, repetition with special effects,
economy—all contribute to their charm. 6
In his “Remembrance of SowQl” (SowQl ]i ch’uQk),7 SowQl’s
teacher and mentor Kim Pk seemed eager to explain that his
former student and literary disciple had been a much better
folk-song poet than modernist poet, perhaps, or KAPF ­writer.
s o w ŏl’s p o e t r y a n d p l a c e i n k o r e a n l i t e r a t u r e Kim Pk wrote that SowQl’s other poems lacked the “youthful
brightness” of his work in the folk-song style. The editors of
KaebyQk—perhaps none other than Kim Pk himself—had
inserted the label “folk-song poem” on the page where SowQl’s
“Azaleas” first appeared, 8 but for whose benefit, for what purpose? Was it meant to locate the poem in a certain segment of
the literary marketplace? Kim Pk and others were publishing
folk-song poems at the time, so perhaps the gesture in SowQl’s
case was intended as an acknowledgment that here was a real
folk-song poem. Kim Pk mentioned “Azaleas” in the “Remembrance” as one of SowQl’s works that every reader would
be familiar with. The labeling also seems resonant with the
argument at the time, in the early 1920s, over various types of
literature and their social or aesthetic purposes, so it may have
been intended as a rejoinder of sorts to KAPF’s program of
socialist realism. In other words, Kim Pk may well have been
viewing and using SowQl as a positive example of the sort of
literary product he was advocating, as opposed to Kim Kijin’s
use of SowQl as an example of what not to do as a writer.
Kim Pk mentions in the “Remembrance” that, as a poet,
SowQl hated being called a folk-song poet, even though, he
went on to say, folk-song poetry was SowQl’s true métier. Perhaps thinking of Kim Kijin’s dismissive comment, SowQl may
indeed have felt some special bitterness in the last years of his
life because of his failure to make a living as a writer. Kim Pk
also mentions SowQl’s businesslike approach to life, observing that he “did not shy away from calculating his own interests in any given situation,” while noting that his uncompromising determination led at times to “disappointments that
others might have borne gently, [but that] he encountered
with a bitter sadness.”
The “Remembrance” comments at length on the poem
“Road Away” as an example of SowQl’s efforts to revise, to
work and rework a poem. According to Kim Pk, “Road
Away” constitutes a true landmark in its deliberate disassembly of the traditional Korean verse line and reassembly of it
for printing on a page for reading. Ironically, this is the poem
that Kim Kijin cited also in his critical reference to SowQl,
i n t r o d u c t i o n
perhaps because he imagined that such poems came easily or
naturally to “folk-song poets.” As SowQl’s teacher at the Osan
Middle School and the Paejae Academy, and after, as SowQl’s
literary mentor, Kim Pk knew firsthand, and attempted to
demonstrate to the readers of the Chosŏn chungang ilbo (ChosQn
Daily News) in 1935, just how demanding was the work in
making a folk-song poem.
Kim Pk’s poignant essay on SowQl is now part of a remarkable range of work on the poet, amounting to several
hundred separate articles and books, including many different
editions of his poems. One can trace through a listing of these
works—for example, in Kim Yongjik’s Kim Sowŏl chQnjip
(Com­plete Works of Kim Sowŏl )—the shifting critical discourse,
from the poet SQ ChQngju’s 1959 essay on resentful feeling in
SowQl’s poetry to the essays from the 1970s on the then new
subject of han (resentment) and SowQl’s poetry, a quite different reading based on the concept of han as a signifier of Korean national culture.9 A history of Korean literary criticism
can be read in the titles of all these various works seeking to
articulate their authors’ engagements, at many different levels
and for many different purposes, from professional to political
to personal, with the works of the simple folk-song poet Kim
SowQl. What accounts for such sustained interest? Why have
so many critics, poets, and literary historians spent so much
time and energy trying to make an account of Kim SowQl’s
poetry? One reason is obvious: it has been a key part of the
secondary-school and college curricula in Korea for many
decades, and it is eminently sensible to try to have something
to say, as a professional writer, about any phenomenon that is
well known to a large number of people.
Gazing from the outside, from a culture lacking national
totemic figures, peering in at Korea’s literary world, where a
best-selling book of poetry may sell 500,000 or more copies,
I shall venture a few observations as a guide for other readers.
A huge amount has been written and published about a relatively small number of poems. What has been written and
published about SowQl has changed, over time, and reflects
changes in analytical method, terms and concepts, political
s o w ŏl’s p o e t r y a n d p l a c e i n k o r e a n l i t e r a t u r e culture, the spoken and written Korean language, as well as
such other matters as simple and unrelenting generational
succession. Yet, however shaped or nuanced by anticolonial
imperatives, national curriculum requirements, or other, more
recent historical circumstances, the literary critical-historical
readings of SowQl’s poetry, and, in particular, of the relatively
small number of his more than 250 works that became a fixed
part of school curricula, seem reductionist: SowQl wrote
charming poems, but they lack reference to modern urban
life, entertain no direct engagement with Korea’s colonized
situation, and deploy no unconventional imagery or language,
or nothing but conventionalized, folk-song-style imagery and
diction.
Given space, however, which among other things means
simply liberation from such critical imperatives, the poems them­
selves make their own rejoinder. “Azaleas,” for example, can
be read as a love song, an anticolonialist spell, and a poem
about itself being read as a poem.
What kind of a poet was SowQl? How might he have explained what he set out to do in his work as a poet? I should
like to propose allowing him to bring these reflections to a
close. Precisely because his works have become so thickly
bound with critical readings of all sorts, I turn to consider one
of his unpublished and therefore unknown and unbound poems, now available thanks to new editions of SowQl’s writings. The poem is “Rainy Day” (Pi on]n nal):10
A rainy day. Some previous day, I might have recited
Verlaine’s song, how the rain of tears falls
in my heart, but
a rainy day, today,
and I just say, “It’s raining.”
Rainy day, today, the poplar leaves are green,
a flock of sparrows perches chattering
in the shadows of the leaves,
a frog, a big fellow sitting on a leaf, lets go a croak
and leaps into the ditch.
A fine rain, the drops trembling,
i n t r o d u c t i o n
one, then two joining, running down.
Even the rain falling in P’yQngyang’s ChangbyQlli
is all the same old rain, but different
from an earlier day’s. Asleep on the warm part
of the floor, my little one stretches
and wakes up with a cry. I say to her
“Look, see how it’s raining,”
as I lift her up, my child
just two years old this year,
holding her close to me.
“Rainy Day” begins with a reference to Paul Verlaine’s “Il
pleure dans mon cœur,” muses playfully on the line and the
image, then concludes with a quite plain, direct, human gesture. The reference to the two-year-old child suggests that
the poem was written around 1921 or shortly after, two years
after SowQl’s first child, his daughter Kusaeng, was born.
There is no indication of youthful awe, on SowQl’s part, at the
literary company he claims to keep, nothing other than equal
comfort with that literary reference, the place, P’yQngyang,
the rain, and the young child looking out the window.
The poem’s opening lines present a subversive gesture
with the acknowledgment, as if it said, “Ah yes, Verlaine, the
French poet, wrote about a day like this. Raining in the heart,
raining on the town. And were I in a mood literary, I certainly could have deployed that French poet, because I (and
you, Dear Reader) know French poetry, do we not?” Even as
he cites the foreign poet, however, SowQl is already moving
away from any sort of homage, using the word “song” (norae)
rather than “poem” (si) to state its genre. But then again, is
that not what Verlaine’s poem actually is? No homage, then; it
is raining. Readers familiar with Verlaine would also know
“Chanson d’automne,” a true paysage triste, and might associate the scene with the autumn.
“Rainy Day” suggests that SowQl was engaged but not
overwhelmed by the poetry of the Continental Symbolists. A
selection of Verlaine’s poems, translated into English by the
British poet Arthur Symons11 and translated, in turn, into Ko-