Yi Mun-Yol ☆ 7 free readYi Mun yol made a strong impression articularly on young readers with two early works Son of Man 1979 and A Portrait of My Youth 1981 The theme of both is a young man s uest for spiritual enlightenment He returns to the theme in this work this time following the initially young man through his entire life Of the three works The Poet is the most interesting and also the most artistically successfulThe book begins with an Author s Preface that is signed Yi Mun yol and is evidently to be taken or less at face value He explains the genesis of the work which he describes as a new novel based on the life of Kim of the Bamboo Hat Kim Sakkat Kim is a real historical figure Kim Pyonyon 1807 1863 a wandering Attack of the Invisible Cats poet who is still famous today Yi explains that he became interested in him when he learned they shared the same fate which is to be the descendant of a traitor and bear the stigma of their ancestor s crime In the case of Kim the ancestor was his grandfather an official who collaborated with rebels in the case of Yi it was his father a southerner who went north during the Korean War Yi represents his story as based on sources not used in the official accounts of Kim s life and differing from those accounts on someoints The narrative is straightforward and unencumbered by footnotes or other scholarly flourishes It divides Kim s life into stages based on what kind of oetry he composed to whom it was addressed and with what intention In terms of the novel these stages represent the inner wanderings of Kim as he searches for and ultimately finds the true way of the oet He enters his final stage after an unrecorded but intense dialog with another ソウルケイジ[Sōru Keiji] poet known as The Old Drunkard whom he has sought out twenty years after their original meeting As a result hisoetry which had undergone various stages of transformation finally had to be ut into forms other than spoken words and written letters which was no easy matter As soon as he ceased to compose oems as acts of dialogue he was no longer a Scottish Rite poet as far as the world was concerned As far as othereople were concerned he was nothing than an old traveler How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science passing their village looking half asleep and half awake filled with a strange sense of self contentment 190However what they saw was not all there was as becomes clear at the end of the book Ehh Interesting concept and lots here about heritage and identity but this writing style didn t do it for me and the main character himself managed to always remain unsympathetic It also seemed like the author just assumed the audience would be interested in him and his story I can t even remember his name it s only mentioned a handful of times which further contributes to this false sense of connection we re expected to have with the character Took me a while to finish because it Life Among the Surrealists put me to sleep every time I tried to read it lol Two stars because it became substantially interesting towards the end but never got around to any kind of compelling theme and I think it somehow managed to stripoetry of its meaning and Ä power by making it solely theersonal tool of a confused and selfish main character rather than any kind of meaningful construct I really wanted to like the oet but I did not enjoy it as much as I wanted Slow to start it never got very exciting for me I did not like their interpretation of the meaning of
POETRY AS I FOUND IT RATHERas I found it rather
AND PRETENTIOUS THE CHARACTER OF THEpretentious The character of the did not appeal to me and I was not able to sympathise with him Yi Mun Yol s The Poet opens with a scene of startling ower a mother from a noble Korean house keens as her four and six year old sons are sent away with a freed serf to hide them from the royal edict of execution against the entire family The boys destination is another serf emancipated so that he will hide them he scolds them in ublic to keep up the appearance of being the true father only to apologize to them afterwards The family s sin is to descend from a grandfather who has not only surrendered his fortress to rebels but joined them Yi s novel is a fictional version of Kim Pyong yon who in the nineteenth century spent his adult life wandering across the eninsula composing oetry Yi has a ersonal interest in this story of how someone creative responds to a family member who turns against the regime since his own father a Communist defected to the North In Yi s version rendered in unfussy When The Light Went Out prose at least in translation Kim abandons his own wife and children his wanderings take him to situations that force him to reassess the story of his grandfather that cost his family so much theoetry that sustains him both hysically and spiritually his early hedonism and his later solidarity with the working classes even the nature of existence itself And yet neither Yi nor Kim in Yi s book addresses the glaring abandonment of his own family by someone who knows how devastating That Can Be Yi Mun Yol Is Perhaps My Favourite can be Yi Mun yol is erhaps my favourite the Korean authors from the ost war generation of Korean authors based on his classic My Twisted Hero and his first novel The Son of Man which was one of my favourite reads of 2016 The Poet tells the story of the 19th Century Ko. When the King's governor after falling into rebel hands and changing sides is recaptured by the royal troops not only is he executed but his son and grandsons are by family tie condemned to death as traitors The little grandsons are uickly sent away in disguise to save their lives While the elder boy grows up to be a street vendor living by his wits. .
Rean itinerant oet Kim Pyeong yeon better known by his nickname Kim Sakkat or Kim of the Bamboo Rain Hat For on the oetry see the English edition of his collected works my review was born to a ivotal moment in Korea s development He was born and grew up in an age when new ideas especially the Practical Learning and Catholicism were being introduced from China There was no challenge to the monarchy or the system of government as such but uestions were beginning to arise in structural terms about such issues as the ossession and distribution of wealth and the nature of human relationshipsAs a child grew up in a noble family but his grandfather governor of a Northern region was convicted of treason when he first surrender to a rebellion then was believed to have actually joined his sympathies to the rebel The grandfather was hung and uartered and the death sentence would normally have applied to his descendants to the 2nd generation so the young was taken to live with a family retainer as his son Even when clemency of a family retainer as his son Even when clemency of a was granted to the family the stench of treachery still lingered The entire retaliatory system against treason was tenacious and thorough even when it deigned to show a degree of leniency They royal court might have decided against carrying out the enalty directly but that by no means meant that the system as such had abandoned its malice towards them The ideology of the system long incubated through various edagogical methods together with the examples of fearful 待つ [Matsu] punishment freuently meted out on traitors had raisedeople s responses to an almost instinctive level Not only the classes who shared in the structures and advantages of society but even those who were the victims of those structures had been conditioned to shudder instinctively at the very word traitor and to consider treason as some kind of deadly disease that could be caught merely by being in the roximity of the descendants of such a erson s novel is ostensibly a historic retelling of s life but the author writes it as a commentary on the traditional accounts of his life attempting to fill in the gaps and Brainwashing of the German Nation provide his own coherent albeitartially fiction version As an example the traditional accounts start with the teenager winning a Encounters with Rauschenberg: (A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture) poetry competition with aolemic against the treacherous governor not realising the family connection only to find out afterwards that his target was his own grandfather Here the author uestions the likelihood of this could the Vögeln ist schön: Die Sexrevolte von 1968 und was von ihr bleibt poet really have grown up fleeing for his life and moving fromrosperity to overty shunned by society without realising why and suggests what might have happened by giving his own unsourced account of his life up to the competition Ultimately the novel euates oetry will rebellion having little sympathy for abstract and academic approaches Not all non conformists are Social Media and Social Movements: The Transformation of Communication Patterns poets But alloets are non conformists Some Principles of Isotope Geology poets have absolutely none of the usual characteristics of a non conformist They are faithful to the normal order of life laughing at its joys weeping at its sorrows Yet they too are non conformists For if aerson is a Ouroboros poet at all he is bound to deviate from the norm at least in the use of language Language can rise to the heavenly realms of highoetry only when it transcends the muddy ground of racticality After becoming a father and #seeming to settle down makes the radical decision to leave his # to settle down makes the radical decision to leave his and children and become an itinerant oet donning the trademark hat that would give him the name by which he became known It was now as he repared to set out that he ut on for the first time the large bamboo hat destined in later times to give him the nickname which replaced his true name completely He wore it to conceal himself from Heaven s gaze to which he felt that he could no longer expose himself with a clear conscience on account of the sin of disloyalty to the throne he had inherited with his blood from their grandfather and the sin against family iety of which he himself had been guilty towards his grandfather to which had to be added a further sin against iety since he had been unable to fulfil his mother s lifelong hopesPerhaps there was yet another feeling of guilt he hoped to hide under that all covering bamboo shield that arising from the ity inspired by his wife as she saw him off trembling with a nameless dread yet never once asking him not to go with Hak kyun out laying childish games and little Ik kyun nothing than a new born baby the Korean caption reads where shall I go today is almost as famous for his colourful life as for his clever but cutting and often scatological Bauern In Mexiko: Zwischen Subsistenz Und Warenproduktion poetry but s focus is on how hisoetry developed and the influences from his life that led to his oetic development As for the other incidents that happened in the Diamond Mountains the reporting of them can be left to the colourful legends about him The main concern here is his life as a oet not as a buffoon a Punainen metsä philanderer a beggar or a sharp tongue There is just one episode that needs to be told in detail that involving his encounter with the Old Drunkard For it was that meeting that finally led him to take the turning that made aoet of. And reconciled to the loss of status it is on the younger son that their mother Forever Im Yours pins her hopes of recovering the family's socialosition In The Poet Yi Mun yol tells the story of this younger son the wandering oet who lived in the strictly hierarchical Korea of than 100 years ago a man driven to the margins of society even as he strove for recognit. Him This fateful meeting took lace IN THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINS NOW KNOWN the Diamond Mountains now known or Mount Kumkang and in North Korea an area to which the oet returned freuently and which inspired much of his A Spectre Is Haunting Texas poetry The drunkard in uestion turned out to be aoet and uestioned s own aesthetic approach based on his burning sense of guilt and resentment than any real Tilak Kathalu poetic sensibility He had set out Away from home and kindred from theast and its wounded shattered ambitions But he was still only someone deviating from the norm not yet fully a oet Needless to say he freuently wrote oems but only as one necessary accomplishment of a scholar or a astime suitable for a gentleman their dominant emotion was not essentially oetic but the sentiment of resentment and idleness which now replaced the ambition that had The Why Cafe previously burned in himBut the Old Drunkard tells him Trueoetry stands solely by its own worth It doesn t have to grovel before the owerful it has no need to be cowed in the resence of learning It doesn t have to keep one eye on the feelings of the rich it has no need to fear the hatred of the deprived It is not to be measured with the yardstick of what is right or weighed only on the scales of what is true It is self contained and self sufficient also has another Satisfying Mommy’s Pregnant Needs (A Psuedo-Incest, Mother-Son, Sleep Sex, Pregnancy, BDSM, Erotic Romance) purpose in mind than a simple if worthwhile historical novel s novels often touch on religion and theoet s guilt has clear echoes of original sin The shadow of a complicity that ultimately came to seem like a sense of original sin on account of the way guilt with crime was considered to be inherited with ublic sentiment for the reservation of the system like an obsession than simple obedience and the lust for revenge always being revived by the inertia of the lower administration he eventually came to consider the state and its laws as nothing but latent violence And eually Soul of Dust pertinently the stain on his record eually echoes that of those whose families end up caught on opposite sides of the Korean War both in the war itself and the subseuent decades of anti Communistanti capitalistersecution in the South and North respectively a situation that applies to the author himself a topic explored further in the novella Meeting With My Brother next on my reading list The novel contains a clever nod to this towards the end when the Shadow Game poet finds himself caught up in aopular rebellion The ERIS: The Patsy (Warped Comedy Adventure Book 1) poetry included at thisoint in the novel unlike the other We Give a Squid a Wedgie poems featured which are historic originals is actually of the author s own invention as the translator explainsThe revolutionaryoems in this chapter unlike the Verräter der Magie poems uotedreviously are not art of the works traditionally ascribed to the oet They are composed by Yi Mun yol in conscious imitation of radical workers oems written in recent years in South Korea or of the militant songs of the North Korean regime The novel ends movingly with the historically documented and unsuccessful attempt of the oet s son to make his father come back to the family home In the novel his son realises the attempt is ultimately futile Would he be able to make clouds move and flowers bloom once back in his own shabby room with its thatched roof Would he still be able to live lofty and indifferent like some old Night of the Wendigo pine tree or a moss covered rock once supported by the labours of Ik kyun his wife and mother and doing his own share of trivial housekeeping chores Would his father still be able to be aoet in the midst of cold stares directed at an old failure come home to Mimi Malloy, At Last! prepare for death or surrounded by a throng of third rateoets drawn like moths around a light to the faded name of someone who in youth had been famous Would he still be able to be a oetThe man moving away in the
glimmering darkness was not his father He was a oet and nothing else A oet tied downdarkness was not his father He was a oet and nothing else A Grammatik Des Biblisch-Aramaischen: Mit Den Nach Handschriften Berichtigten Texten Und Einem Worterbuch poet tied down nothing in the whole world His father moved beyond the brushwood gate of the inn and stepped on to the grassy forest trail at that very moment he vanished completely Has he turned into a tree Or a rock Or a white brier rose Or the early morning mist now beginning to thicken As those thoughts came to him Ik kyun uickly changed his still unspoken words ofrotest into a blessing Farewell May you ever find A Neve Estava Suja peace andlenty in your The Art of Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting poetryUltimately a fascinating character study of aoet s life and vocation albeit one where the Im Zeichen der Triskele: Ein Bretagne-Krimi prose is very far from lyrical The English reader also struggles a little with theoetry which relies rather heavily on Chinese and Korea world lay see review of the Collected Works linked above and has to take the traditional accounts on which the author comments on trust The translation is by Brother Anthony of Taize a truly wonderful ambassador for Anglo Korean relations and for Korean literature working here with Chong wa Chung and who also rovided a very helpful introduction as well as notes on these topics where neededUseful reviews and articlesThe complete text of the book Anthony of Taize on translating Korean literature articles in the excellent Korean Literature in Translation website s Reading List the other go to De obotliga optimisternas klubb place for K lit reviews The Complete Review review the go to site forretty much all translated literature. Ion as an outstanding oet; a man constantly tempted to make compromises even to the oint of betraying his family in order to fulfil his mother's ambition and yet survive as a free spirit This delicately told story of a lonely fight for self respect of a uest to reconcile duty and Fatal Dive: Solving the World War II Mystery of the USS Grunion privilege in an oppressive society is a luminousarable for our time.