Poetry
Love's Silence and Other Poems
님의 침묵
Han Yong-un · 1926
Synopsis
Eighty-eight poems, opened by a brief foreword and closed by an address to the readers, speak to an absent “nim”, the beloved whom the first of them, which gives the book its title, associates with silence. The word can mean the lover, the nation, truth or the Buddha, and each piece reads equally well as a lament of love, a religious meditation or a call to the country: according to the Canadian publisher of the English translation, love here starts from a desire for total union and ends in the understanding of emptiness.
Context
The book, completed in August 1925 at the Osegam hermitage in the Seorak mountains, appeared on 20 May 1926 from Hoedong Seogwan; it was its author's only book of verse. According to the Seoul daily that described the original edition in 2003, the 168-page volume separates words according to the rhythm of the sentence and mixes neologisms with dialect words, and the colonial authorities banned it shortly after its release, so that it circulated little. The Korea Literature Translation Institute sees in it first of all a literary resistance to colonisation and to the limits it imposed on expression.
Who it is for
Poems to be read in their order, from the foreword to the final address; translated into French in 1996 and into English in 1999.
Prizes and reception
The Literature Translation Institute of Korea lists twelve translations, notably in French and English.
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The pages consulted to check this page.