| Kim Chi Ha: His Life and Works | 자유게시판&관련 사진 | 2005-01-13 16:58:33 |
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*1990. 8. 15/英文 평론 /Kim Chi Ha: His Life and Works (김지하의 삶과 문학)/Modern Praxis(歷史批判: 일본) No. 10 창간 5주년 특대호(PP 376-387)/ Kim Chi Ha: His Life and Works by Paul Lee (靑山 이풍호 시인) I. A Symbol of the Oppressed People``s Resistance A symbol of the oppressed Korean people``s suffering and resistance, Kim Chi Ha was born on February 4, 1941, in Mokpo, located in Korea``s Southern Cholla-Do province. Kim entered Seoul National University``s college of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1959. He participated in the student demonstrations in Seoul in April 1960, forcing Syngman Rhee to resign and go into exile in Hawaii. He spent parts of 1961 and 1962 ″wandering″ in the Korean countryside, then, after returning to the university, took part in the 1964 student movement against talks being conducted for the normalization of relations between Korea and Japan. In 1964 he wrote ″Cry! National Democracy.″ Suspected of leadership and organizational roles in the student demonstrations, Kim was tortured and imprisoned. Nevertheless, after his release he participated in the 1965 student movement against the Korea-Japan normalization treaty. After graduating from the university in 1966 with a degree in aesthetics, Kim once again took to the road, working at odd jobs and writing. In 1967 he found thatt his tuberculosis had become chronic, and he was forced to spend the next two years in the Seoul Municipal sanitarium. Leaving the hospital in spring 1969, he worked at a movie script, in theater workshops and at other related projects, continuing all the while to write poetry. Kim then made his debut in poetry magazine ″Poet″ with five poems including ″Yellow Dust Road″ and became the most acclaimed poet and most outspoken critic of Chung Hee Park``s authoritarian regime. In May 1970 he published ″Ojok″(Five Bandits) in the popular intellectual literary magazine ″Sasanggye.″ Interpreted as condemning various aspects of mis-used power ″Five Bandits″ - Tycoon, Assemblyman, Government official, General, and Minister in modern Korea, the poem was well-received and was reprinted by the opposition in its party organ. The opposition party``s newspaper was then confiscated by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and the poet, the magazine``s publishers, as well as other figures, were all arrested under the Anti-Communist Law. After 100 day- prisonment and court proceedings, he was freed on bail, with charges still hanging over his head. Three months after his release from jail, where he was again tortured, Kim``s first anthology, ″Hwangto″ (Yellow Earth), was published in December 1970. In April 1972, Kim Chi Ha published ″Bio″ (Groundless Rumors), another critical work of the Establishment, this time in the Catholic magazine ″Creation.″ The magazine``s publisher, Yu Bong Jun, and Ku Jung So, the editor, were interogated by the KCIA, and the poet, who had been leading a semi-nomadic existance in the Korean countryside in order to avoid further police and KCIA interference, was tracked down, arrested and sent to a sanitarium in Masan. He was forbidden to meet with the foreign press under threats of further penalties being applied to his family and friends, and was eventually charged on May 31 with ″having made remarks slandering the incumbent government.″ In May 1973, Kim Chi Ha married Kim Young Ju, daughter of popular novelist Park Kyung Li. On January 8, 1974, the poet escaped to ″hide″ from the first two of four emergency decrees issued by Park Chung Hee. On April 25, he was arrested at the hotel by the police in the Huksando Island of Mokpo while he participated in shooting a movie of ″Chungnyo″ (Blue Girl) as an assistant director. When he was under investigation by the KCIA, he heard that his first son was born. In early May, campaigns were mounted in Japan to secure the poet``s release. The international campaign was organized for the poet from Tokyo included such luminaires as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, Costa Gavras, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Pouillon, Claude Simon, and Louis Malle. On July 13, he was convicted of supporting the Federation of Democratic Youth and Students which allegedly organized the students and Christian demonstrations against the Park dictatorship in March and April and violation of the fourth emergency decrees issued on April 13, an even harsher decree with a penalty of up to death. The decree was issued to crack down on a clandestine student body, the National Federation of Democratic Youth and Students, accused of an attempt to overthrow the Park government and set up a Communist regime in Seoul. It was under this decree that nine people were sentenced to death and twenty others including dissident poet Kim Chi Ha and student leaders, were given life imprisonment. On July 20, 1974, only immense pressure brought to bear on behalf of Kim and other political prisoners in Korea forced the korean government to back down and commute the poet``s sentence to life imprisonment. On February 15, 1975, thanks to international pressures, he was released under a conditional amnesty. On March 13, at 9: 40 in the morning he was arrested in 27 days because of the publication of a newspaper series in which he exposed the fabrication of the so-called People``s revolutionary Party conspiracy and his prison writings ″Ordeal-1974″ in the Daily Dong-A. In the mid-May, 1975, he wrote ″A Declaration of Coscience - To All Who Cherish Truth And Justice.″ This declaration was delivered by an anonymous to outside of the prison and certain minister made public this declaration in the foreign country through the mass medias and shoked the world to believe that Kim was ″not a communist.″ On June 29, 1975, the Afro-Asian Writers Association awarded Kim Chi Ha its special Lotus Prize. On March 20, the Park government distributed the so-called Kim``s handwritten confession ″I Am a Communist″ which was fabricated by KCIA. The Chosun Ilbo first published this. On April 4, the government announced ″The Case of Violation of the Anti-Communist Law on Kim Chi Ha″ which was fabricated by KCIA. 90,000 copies of these 100 page-pamphlets were printed and translated into many foreign languages and mailed out to Japan, the United States and other countries. On the basis of a forced confession and excerpts from Kim Chi Ha``s prison notes, this pamphlet purported to show that he was a communist. Coming as it did just at the time when Kim was on trial in Seoul on that charge, the pamphlet was a clear attempt to prepare world opinion for the death sentence that was to follow the trial. Soon after the pamphlet appeared in the United States, Time magazine carried a long article on Korea that included a brief account of the pamphlet and what it seemed to portend. Fortunately, and perhaps as a result of such coverage, the prosecution sought a prison term rather than the widely anticipated death penalty. On December 20, 1976, Kim Chi Ha was sentenced to 7 years in prison and he immediately appealed to the Superior Court. On December 20, 1980, the poet was ereleased but his civil rights were still pending. In 1981 Kim Chi Ha received ″the Great Poet Award″ from Poetry International. In August 1984, Kim Chi Ha was pardoned from the related emergency decrees which were enforced by the Park dictatorship after over a decade and rehabilitated by the Chun Doo Hwan government. As a free citizen, Kim published and publishes his various literary works: the collections of his essays and long poems. While he lives at 1023 Haksung-Dong, Wonju-Si, Gangwon-Do, Korea, a trial for dissident poet Kim Chi Ha, scheduled to open recently at the Seoul High Court after a 14-year delay, was postponed again, this time at the request of his lawyers who wanted six months of medical treatment for Kim (The Korea Times Los Angeles 10/27/1989). II. Kim Chi Ha and His Satirical Depictions on Political Corruption The writing of poetry in Korea has become a political martyrdom for socially oriented poets since 1970, at latest, when Kim Chi Ha was arrested on the charge of having violated the so-called ″Anti- Communist Law″ for his long poem ″Five Bandits″ (1970), published in the ″Sasanggye,″ a monthly magazine. It is obvious that the dictatorship practiced in Korea is obsessed with its fear of poetry and the poet. That is to say, poetry is functioning as a vital force of expressing the people``s mind, spirit, and life. The vein of satirical realism which began to flourish by younger poets has developed into a much more directly critical, activist type of engagement from the seventies on. The poet``s name is put in the Korean manner with the surname coming first: Kim Chi Ha instead of Chi Ha Kim. The evolution of Kim Chi Ha``s poetry records his journey from a position far removed to a point at the very center of his own life, and the life of the Korean people. His earlier poems, gathered in ″Hwangto″ (Yellow Earth, 1970) were the only collection of his works to be published in Korea before his release in 1980, have a distant tone, and express an almost impersonal anger, as in such poems as ″Amber″ or ″No One.″ People are notably absent in these poems; the poems record their absence, or their not-long-past disappearance. Even in so moving a poem as ″Yellow Earth″ the Lament is for another; Kim Chi Ha consistantly keeps his own person removed from the stage of his poems. In the long, satiric allegories which compose the second segment of his work, in such poems as ″Five Bandits″ (1970) and ″Groundless Rumors″ (1972), Kim discovered the means to dramatize the plight of the common man in Korea, afflicted by the creatures of a political and corporate bureaucracy whose only apparent purpose is to crush him. In these longer poems, ″Dahmsi″ one finds a strong accent of traditional Korean oral literature. The broad characterizations, grotesque physical attributes of the villain and bumbling innocence of the protagonists, recall the Korean mask dance genre in particular, with its pointed jibes at the Yi Dynsty ″Yangban,″ or Scholar-gentry, and their allies in exploitation, the Buddist priests. The legless, headless, armless and voiceless Ahndo in ″Story of a Sound,″ booming out the sound of his stubborn existence even in the deepest prison cell, represents Kim himself. Kim Chi Ha presents himself, in his most poems in 1960s and 1970s, declaring with his own voice the fact of his continuing resistance to the blandishments, threats, and terror, of the Korean government. Kim Chi Ha can be lyrically sentimental, especially in his more recent poetry. He is at times incensed or sadened by such events as the Emergency Decrees of 1974, which made all criticism of the government illegal. In this period, political events in Korea had come to be episodes in his own personal life, and his life had come to be public, and radically politicized. Even his pen name (his given name is Yong Il) expressed a political position. Ordinarily written with the two Chinese characters meaning ″grass stream,″ with a different pair of characters having the same pronunciation it means ″underground.″ There were very few people in Korea today who would not recognize ″Kim Chi Ha, poet″ among the defendents listed in news of the various government cases; there were few, on the other hand, even among the university students, who recognize ″Kim Yong Il, writer.″ The translation of Kim Chi Ha``s poetry is difficult because of the area of English poetry into which it translates. The real problem and challenge is to explain Kim Chi Ha``s poetic range in ″Dahmsi,″ the long satires, the poems in which he was working in Korean, rather than western patterns. ″Story of a Sound″ and the other long poems from the same general period in Kim Chi Ha``s work represent a deliberately chosen shift in direction from the angry or overwhelmingly sad, lonely voice of the poems in ″Yellow Earth″ to poems which are filled with the irreverent humor of Korean folk literature, and people with a rich assortment of characters. These poems translate the old rural entertainments of the dramatic narrative ″pansori″ and the mask dance to the contemporary urban setting of Seoul. ″Pansori″ has had, and continues to have an upper class air, reflecting the influence of professional, highly trained performers on its transmission and development, but the penetration of its stories and songs throughout Korean culture is thorough and deep. In the ″pansori,″ a form consisting of sung and spoken narrative, highly rhythmical passages intermingle with slow, lyrical laments, love songs, and patter songs, in a mixture which is in many ways similar to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The difference may be grasped however, by imaginating the chorus, the hero, heroine, and emperor in ″The Mikado″ all performed by a single person whose only prop is a fan, and whose only accompaniment is a single drum. Despite certain structural similarities, in terms of content and point of view the Korean ″pansori″ and Kim Chi Ha``s long poems are radically different. As a genre, ″pansori″ took as their subject matter questions of Confucian virtue, and discovered many of their plots in stories of the testing of tradionally defined virtue against conditions or events hostile to it. In contrast to the uper class, Cofucian orientation of the ″Pansori,″ in Korean folk Literature, particulary in the puppet plays and mask dances, the lines of dramatic conflict, such as they are, follow the cleavage between classes, rather than formal categories of moral or virtuous behavior. The long satiric poems seem to reflect Kim Chi Ha``s efforts to go back to the origins of his life``s work, to the folk drama of an earlier, traditional, largely rural Korea. There in the puppet plays and mask dances he discovered a common ground of language, experience, humor - so scanty in ″Yellow Earth″ - and most importantly people. In the best of the long poems he achieves a fusing of the more sustained dramatic structure of the ″pansori″ with the vulgar delights of folk literature. ″Story of a Sound″ is the best of the long satires for this reason. It should be read with the inner ear opened to the humor in its lines: Ahndo``s frantic races around Seoul or the never-ending recitation of charges against him are meant more to evoke our smiles or laughter than our outrage. ″Five Bandits″ contains numerous passages filled with quite untranslatable puns using Chinese characters. The title ″Kogwan,″ one of the sections in ″Groundless Rumors,″ means governmental official, but in the poem it is written with the Chinese characters meaning ″view from the buttocks.″ While the long satires draw upon a wide variety of sources in the oral tradition in Korea, the closing scene of ″Story of a Sound″ in ″Groundless Rumors″ echoes quite directly a scene from the ″pansori″ - Tale of Spring Fragrance.″ In the passage in question, after Ahndo has been tried, convicted, mutilated, and thrown in prison, the poem goes on: And so, pitiless, they threw poor Ahndo into the moss-grown, dark and dreary cell. Shaa-bang! The sound of the locks, echoing farther and farther away down the tunnels of the prison... ″No! This can``t be! It can``t! How can it be? How can it? Starving, in rags, I worked nearly to death; Beaten and yelled at, I didn``t say a word. No chance to rest, to sleep, even to lie down. Then why has this happened? What awful crime has brought this unbearable punishment? Oh geese flying so high! You know what is inside me. Tell me: where the millet stalks reach their long shadows through the heavy sunlight by the newly-built road, is my mother still standing, waiting for me? Weeping silently, in clothes worn far past their season, does her gaze reach out, time and again toward Seoul?″ In ″Tale of Spring Fragrance,″ the 16 year-old heroine Chunhyang is eventually beaten and thrown into prison for refusing the advances of the corrupt new governor. Her prison lament begins with the description: And in the prison she had entered, what was the jail cell like? Between the broken bamboo bars slid a flesh-piercing winds; through cracks and gaps in the crumbling walls fleas and bedbugs swarmed over her body. Here is the lament of Chunhyang in the prison. What crime was it? What wrong have I done? I have not stolen government grain. Why then have I been beaten? I am not guilty of murder. Why am I shackled and chained? I have not broken the rules of conduct. Why am I bound hand and foot? I have not committed any offense. What is this punishment for? The long lament comes to a close with the following passages: With the bamboo slats opened, clear moonlight entered the cell where the young girl, all alone, looked up at the moon, saying: O moon, do you see him? Lend me your bright face, so I can see him too. Is my love lying down, or is he sitting? Tell me what you see; Please answer, and ease my sorrows. The structures of the two scenes are similar in many respects. Especially in the desolate isolation, and through the apostrophe to a natural element-moon, or geese - which can, from their height, see the object of the prisoner``s imagination and longing, these two scenes touch a common theme in much of Korean vernacular literature. The differences in the two scenes are striking, however. The whole story of Chunhyang``s love affair and marriage, her young husband``s departure for the capital, the new administrator``s attempt to take her into his house and her refusal, are a record of non-action. Chunhyang is beautiful and draws two men to her; one. of noble linage and virtuous young character, makes her his wife, and then leaves her to continue his studying for the civil service examination; the other, ostensibly of upper class background, but of immoral character, wants to make her his concubine. Chunhyang can not or does not want to refuse Mr. Lee, the first suitor; she wants to refuse and does refuse the second, and winds up in prison. Her only action, stemming from her only choice, is to refuse, or not. Ahndo in ″Story of a Sound″ tries everything, each one of the jobs that the lower class commoner, worker, must take on in 1970s Seoul. Though he tries and tries, he is refused. Nothing opens to him but prison. Yet at the moment when he refuses to accept any longer the false promise of his frantic labors, when he recognizes that the place of plenty which he left home to find is no more than a dog``s world, when he stops running around and around in the frantic circles which keep the machinery going, he achieves independence, retrieves his integrity as a human being, and is thrown in jail. And there, out of his anger, and refusal to accept the grotesque physical mutilations which replace the psychic mutilations of the outside world, he finds the voice, the booming sound ″Kung, Kung...″ of his repeated, insistent declaration of existence. The sound made, in his myth, by a still-living man whose voice, hands, feet, head, sex, everything except a mutilated torso has been chopped off by decree, but who persists in hurling that torso at the wall of his cell - a sound heard in the remotest corners of the city of Seoul, day and night... ″Kung-Kung.″ The sound, the poem teels us, brings terror into the souls of financiers and generals. But its persistence makes ordinary people, who know the prisoner is not a ghost but a living spirit, glance stealthily at each other with a strange flashing look. Kim Chi Ha is a gifted poet, one who has made his art serve his life. In the course of his growth as a poet, he has moved from the distant, impersonal tone of such as ″No One,″ taken from ″Yellow Earth″ (1970), the only collection of his poems to be published in Korea, to the openess of ″By the Sea″ and ″Two A.M.,″ among those which circulated in samidzat form in 1974, while he was ″hiding″ from the authorities. He has also explored the rich resources of traditional Korean oral literature in the long satirical poems that constitute the middle portion of his career. The ″Story of a Sound,″ selected in turn from the long poem ″Groundless Rumors,″ illustrates Kim``s use of the narrative style and irreverent tone of the folk dramas. In a happier time, Kim Chi Ha``s efforts to adapt traditional Korean verse forms and oral genres to a modern outlook would be more generally apprehended than present conditions in the Korean literary world allow. Kim Chi Ha``s most recent poems could not be separated from his life, and that life could not then be separated from the life of Korea. In their plain, direct phrases, the poems reflect moments in a story we already knew. By his wavering refusal, Kim Chi Ha has commanded the steady and fearful attention of the regime. Through his poems, Kim Chi Ha invites demands all of us to bear him witness. *필자: 충남 예산 출생. 휘문고 졸업(59회). 인하대 공대 전기공학과 졸업. California State University, Los Angeles (캘리포니아주 주립대학) 영문학과 졸업. 월간문학, 현대문학, 시문학, 시조문학, 죽순 등을 통해 문학활동 시작하다. 그동안 한국, 미국, 일본, 중국, 프랑스, 인도 등의 문학지에 작품 발표하다. 1980년 12월 20일 로스앤젤레스로 건너와, 1981년부터 2000년까지 캘리포니아주 교통국(State of California Dept. of Transportation)에서 전기 엔지니어로 근무하다. 2003년부터 호놀룰루에서 살고 있다. 이풍호 시인 문학서재=> http://paullee.kll.co.kr --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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