Ko Un

Ko Un, 2009
Birth Name
Hangeul	고은태
Hanja	高 銀泰
Revised Romanization	Go Eun-tae
McCune- Reischauer	Ko Ŭnt'ae
pseudonym
Hangeul	고은
Hanja	高 銀
Revised Romanization	Go Eun
McCune- Reischauer	Ko Ŭn
See also : Korean name

Ko Un at a reading at the poetry festival in Berlin 2014

Ko Un (born Ko Eun-tae, Buddhist name Ilcho, born August 1, 1933 in Kunsan , North Chŏlla Province , South Korea ) is one of the most important and productive contemporary Korean poets and writers. He is also a professor at Dankook University .

Life

From 1952 he lived as a Buddhist monk for ten years and suffered state repression in the 1980s because of his political commitment in his home country. During his life he published more than 130 books: volumes of poetry, novels, essays, reviews and translations.

When Ko Un was born, his country was occupied by Japan and he was receiving an education shaped by the Japanese school system. A gifted student, he was influenced early on by Chinese poetry and the works of important poets such as Han Ha-un , who is known in Korea as the "Leprosy". At 17, Ko was teaching Korean and the arts at a middle school in his home village when the Korean War broke out in 1950 . Traumatic experiences during the capture of his village by North Korean and Chinese soldiers and after forced service in the North Korean People's Army led to a mental breakdown and attempted suicide; In 1952, Ko fled to a remote Buddhist mountain monastery, where he found rest and recovery.

Ko learned Zen meditation and traveled all over Korea as a mendicant monk with his teacher Hyobong . He rose in the monastery hierarchy and became head of the monastery and a member of the central committee of the National Association of Buddhist Monks ; Together with another monk, Ko founded the Buddhist newspaper in 1957 , in which some of his poems and essays appeared. A year later, in 1958, on the recommendation of the well-known poet Cho Chi-hun, his poem Tuberculosis was published in the magazine Moderne Poesie  - the beginning of his poetic career, which was continued in 1960 with his first volume of poetry.

In 1960 there was another change in life in Kos and its country: student protests against presumed election manipulation by President Rhee Syng-man ended in bloody unrest and the president's exile. Ko Us poems found more and more followers, some became resistance hymns. In 1962, Ko decided to give up his monastic life and a public resignation manifesto appeared in the daily newspaper Hankook Ilbo . The reasons given are both his disappointment with monastic structures and his desire to devote himself entirely to the life of the poet and the “outside world”.

Ko moved to Jeju Island , founded a non-profit school for socially disadvantaged children and published a second volume of poetry in 1966. Before he returned to Seoul in 1967, a period of self-doubt and alcohol addiction began; According to Kos, it was triggered by reading Mikhail Scholokhov's novel The Silent Don , which had just been published in Japanese at the time. Although he wrote numerous poems in Seoul, he fell into disrepair; his crisis culminated in another suicide attempt and a thirty hour coma in 1970.

One way out of the deep came in 1973 when Ko assumed a leading role in the Korean democracy movement. Under President Park Chung-hee , the country again suffered from dictatorship and human rights violations. As the first general secretary of the writers' association founded in 1974 and a key figure in the human rights movement, Ko came into the focus of the secret service KCIA , was persecuted, imprisoned several times and tortured. His poetic work from this period is extremely extensive.

After the fatal assassination attempt on Park Chung-hee in October 1979, Ko was elected chairman of a national association for unity. His eardrum was destroyed during torture. In May 1980, the poet was charged with high treason, tried before a court martial and sentenced to life imprisonment. Due to a general amnesty, he was released from prison in 1982, but was instead placed under house arrest. In 1983, at the age of nearly 50, he married the English teacher Lee Sang-wha; In 1985 their daughter Cha-ryong was born.

The eighties were for the poet in spite of repression full creativity. His imprisonment inspired him to write the epic Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) cycle . But especially after retiring to family life in 1984, he published numerous poems, novels, translations, essays and reviews, many of which were translated into the most important Asian and European languages. In 1989, Ko was arrested again. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ko became chairman of the national artists 'association and the writers' association. Since 1994 he has been teaching postgraduate courses at Kyonggi University in Seoul.

In 1997 Ko traveled to Tibet and spent 40 days in the mountains of the Himalayas . A government-approved trip to North Korea in 1998 and a one-year stay in the USA at Harvard University followed in 1998. When Kim Dae-jung was the first South Korean president to travel to North Korea for peace talks in 2000 as part of the so-called sunshine policy , Ko Un accompanied him.

Even in the new millennium, Ko published several volumes of poetry. In 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2010 he was traded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature . In an interview with the Korea Times , Ko talks about possible reasons for his disregard. He speculates that it could have played a role that his texts could not be translated into English without compromises due to the cultural differences.

Ko Un has lived in Ansŏng, South Korea , since 1982 .

Works

• "Choguk-ŭi pyŏl" ( The Stars Above the Land of the Fathers ), 1984

Translations

German

• The voice lives in every silence , Falter, Vienna 1989, ISBN 978-3-85439-065-7 .
• The stars over the land of the fathers , Suhrkamp, ​​1996 & 2005, ISBN 3-518-40785-6 , ISBN 3-518-22395-X .
• Zen-Gedichte in Akzente (magazine) H. 4, August 1999, ISBN 3-446-23219-2 , pp. 357-384.
• A day full of wind. Poems. Pendragon, 2002, ISBN 3-929096-98-6 .
• Zen poems, what'n that? , Angkor, Frankfurt am Main 2005/2010, ISBN 978-3-936018-37-0 , ISBN 978-3-936018-98-1 .
• When awakening from sleep , Wallstein Verlag , Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0144-3 .
• Flowers of the moment , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42225-0 .

English

• Ten Thousand Lives , Green Integer, 2005, ISBN 978-1-933382-06-7 .
• The Three Way Tavern: Selected Poems , University of California, 2006, ISBN 978-0-520-24613-3 .
• Flowers of a Moment , BOA Editions Ltd., 2006, ISBN 978-1-929918-88-1 .
• Abiding places: Korean South & North , Tupelo, 2006, ISBN 978-1-932195-40-8 .
• Songs for Tomorrow: Poems 1960–2002 , Green Integer, 2009, ISBN 978-1-933382-70-8 .
• Maninbo. Peace and War. , Bloodaxe Books 2015, ISBN 978-1-78037-242-6 .

Awards

• Korean Literature Prize (1974)
• Manhae Literature Prize (1989)
• JoongAng Culture Prize (1991)
• Taesan Literature Prize (1994)
• Manhae Grand Prix (1998)
• Buddhist Literature Prize (1999)
• Tanjae Prize (2004)
• Cikada Prize (2006)
• Griffin Poetry Prize (2008)

Web links

Commons : Ko Un  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ko Un in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography Ko Uns from Pendragon-Verlag
• Author's website (can not be navigated without Flash )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ LTI Korea Author Database: 고은 ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 17, 2014. 
2. ↑ Naver Person Database: 네이버 인물 검색: 고은 , accessed January 17, 2014 (Korean).
3. ↑ Is Korean language a “disadvantage” to get a Nobel literature prize? In: Korea Times . November 20, 2010, accessed November 28, 2010 . 

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Ko is the family name here, Un is the first name.