The obvious.

I’ve avoided what actually matters to me in order to favour what others may [but probably will not] care for. I blame this on some old misguided notion of mine: “Blog = public, by necessity.” Instead, how about, “Blog = private, propelled quietly into the public sphere”? That’s far better suited to what I should be doing here.

I named this blog for Han Yong-un (Manhae), the first Korean poet I ever read. Yet somehow, it never occurred to me to make a blog about Korean literature. I suppose it all seemed too inaccessible at the time. I’ve since become a fan of contemporary Korean novelist Kim Young-ha, and for months, I’ve been picking away at Ko Un’s The Sound of My Waves.

Korean literature is as fresh as a slap in the face to my tedious western sensibilities. I love it… because I don’t understand it… because I love it. It enters, finds nowhere to affix itself, and leaves as efficiently as it arrived. Consider this, from here on in, an attempt to craft an adhesive– to make Korean literature as sticky [to me] as it is salient:

They live
in a world of their own

Their spirits go floating
under the cliffs and high above,
they are the wind echoing
(“Chon-un Temple” 1-5)

The first lines of the first poem in Sound of My Waves. Perfectly appropriate, I’d say.

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Ko Un. “Chon-un Temple.” The Sound of My Waves. Trans. Brother Anthony of Taize and Kim Young-Moo. Seoul: Dap Gae, 1993. 28-31.