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Translated by James Kimbrell and Yu Jung-yul
"These translations are the liveliest and most readable I've seen of Modern Korean poetry. Beginning with Yu and Kimbrell's spirited and intelligent essay, Three Poets of Modern Korea gives a wonderful sense of the range in that country's writing; it's hard to imagine a better introduction to Korean poetry."
—Robert Hass
2003 American Literary Translators Association Award Finalist
In contemporary Korea, as noted by James Kimbrell and Yu Jung-yul in their introduction, "poems are found on mountain boulders, on café walls, on placemats, T shirts, and television game shows." It is a country in which, for one-thousand years, every candidate for civil service had to pass an exam establishing proficiency as a poet. And yet, though Americans may know something of Korea's modern history of tumult—division and repression—little of the country's rich and varied poetry has been available to the English-speaking public. In Three Poets of Modern Korea, prize-winning American poet James Kimbrell, and translator and native speaker Yu Jung-yul, have gathered and translated leading representatives of three generations of Korean poets. From the Dada and surrealist influenced work of Yi Sang, to the colloquial, affirming poems of Hahm Dong-seon, and ending with the brilliant sensuality of Choi Young-mi, whose work also asserts a determination to be both a woman and a free individual, Three Poets of Modern Korea is a superb introduction to the largely undiscovered treasures of contemporary Korean poetry. The translations by Kimbrell and Jung-yul, many of which have appeared in premier American literary journals, manage to be faithful to the originals at the same time they take on true life and breath as fluent poems in English.
Yi Sang was trained as an architect during the period of Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. He was a controversial poet in his own time, and continues provoke readers to this day. Incorporating a range of tone from the surreal to the hermetic, from the comic to the scientific, he is perhaps best known for his subversive blending of these sources with a more native Korean idiom. He was the author of numerous short stories and poems collected in various posthumous volumes. Arrested in Tokyo for "thought crimes" in 1936, he died in Japan of tuberculosis shortly after his release.
Hahm Dong-seon was born in 1930 in Yonbaek, Hwanghae Province. Though Yon baek was located in the South when Korea was partitioned after World War II, it became a part of North Korea after the cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953. Exiled from his home, Hahm Dong-seon has acted as Chairman of the Korean Modern Poets Association and Vice Chairman of Korean PEN. An established poet, literary commentator and essayist, Hahm Dong-seon is the author of many books including Short Time, Long Story (Seoul: Sanmok, 1997), Thinking of Home from a Distance (Seoul: Kyongwon Publishers, 1994) and Colony (Seoul: Chunghanmunhwa Sa, 1986). He is Professor Emeritus at Chung Ang University in Seoul.
Choi Young-mi was born in 1961 into a large Catholic family living in an outlying area of Seoul, South Korea, Choi Young-mi was one of many students to participate in the often violent pro-democracy riots of the 1980’s, a decade that witnessed Korea’s rapid economic growth alongside its new status as the world’s largest importer of tear-gas. Choi Young-mi’s popularity has continued to rise since Changbi, Korea’s leading literary publisher, issued her first volume of poems in 1993, At Thirty, The Party Was Over, a volume that went on to sell over half a million copies. She is the author of a second volume of poems, Bicycling in Dreamland (Seoul: Changbi, 1998) as well as a collection of travel writing, Melancholy of the Era (Seoul: Changbi, 1997). She is currently at work on her first novel.
Yu Jung-yul was born in Pusan, South Korea in 1969. She holds degrees in French Literature from Pusan National University, and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College. A freelance photographer and translator, she is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Studio Art at Florida State University.
James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He is a graduate of Millsaps College, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Virginia, and the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the author of a volume of poems, The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998), and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery" The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University.
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