Reviews

Flowers of a Moment by Anthony of Taizé, Ko Un, Gary Gach, Young-Moo Kim

jarichan's review against another edition

4.0

In kurzen und knappen Sätzen vermag es Ko Un, ganze Geschichten, Erlebnisse, Universen zu erzählen. Er nimmt den Alltag in all seiner Intensität wahr, ob dieser nun aus Beobachtungen im Garten besteht oder dem Krieg. Ko Un hat beides erlebt und dies vermittelt er uns in diesem Band. Worte, Gedichte, Sätze, die unter die Haut gehen.

leonardo_munoz's review against another edition

3.0

Es interesante ver que con un montón de poemas cortos escritos durante toda la vida con gran simpleza logra grandes imagenes, muchas de ellas mediante la antítesis o una frase que las exhalta al final. Lamento no tener alguna referencia sobre poesía zen para poder identificar lo más característico: lo más que sé son las frases clichés de películas. En todo caso, con algo se empieza.
Pero viendo el problema de forma global, son poemas de gran calidad y me sorprendieron algunos que se salían de la onda de solo sabiduría y nada de opiniones. Hay algunos poemas con un fuerte tono político, derivado de su paso por la cárcel y las protestas contra los regímenes coreanos, y otros en los que existe un fuerte pesimismo que lo aleja de la posición mítica de un monje y demuestra su condición ordinaria de ser humano.

arirang's review

3.0

In the old days a poet once said
our nation is destroyed
yet the mountains and rivers survive

Today's poet says
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
yet our nation survives

Tomorrow's poet will say
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
our nation is destroyed and Alas!
you and I are completely destroyed

순간 의 꽃 by 고 은 (Ko Un) was reverently translated into English, as Flowers of a Moment, by the prolific Brother Anthony of Taizé together with Young-moo Kim and Gary Gach, and the translators also provide a helpful afterword.

Ko Un is a former Buddhist monk and pro-democracy political prisoner but now better known as Korea's foremost poet, and a perennial contender, at least per the pundits, for the Nobel Prize for literature.

Flowers of a Moment consists of 185 brief Zen poems, illustrated by some simple but powerful ink-brush calligraphy (wordless poems) by Ko Un himself.

The poems range over a large number of themes, but if one common thread emerged in my reading it was Ko Un using the diminutive in nature as a comparison to human passions and struggles. One poem starts: "What labour is there to equal nature?". Two brief examples :

The beak of a chick pecking at feed
My studies too are far from complete

Cobweb drenched all day long by monsoon rains
you too are enduring great trials

The poems are un-punctuated, at least by comma and full-stop, and there is even a neat poem about that:

Comma
period
after forty-five sloppy years of mine
thank you
I promise never to put you to shame again

While some poems touch on politics, particularly the plight of prisoners, others are relatively obscure and Zen-like and and would presumably repay meditative contemplation:

Remorse! Without it, what truth can there be?
Mid-November
Someone is standing by the sea at Taebu Island
at low tide
Scraps of trash drift by

although even there the poet has a poem about the futility of struggling too hard with understanding:

Once you have cracked all 1700 koans
In the sky there will still be clouds

My personal favourite, because I love Jeju Island, at whose centre the dormant Hallasan lies, was this:

Longing to explode once more
Longing to be a sea of fire

Paeknok Lake in the crater of Halla Mountain

Although here I feel the translators may have missed a trick. The lake is called 백록담 and the literal translation, White Deer Lake, would have been more poetic than the translators' choice to render the name in English phonetically.

But my personal favourite of all Korean poems is from the frustratingly undertranslated (I can't find any English language collection) 류시화 (Ryu Shi-Hwa) and his lovely line 그대가 곁에 있어도 나는 그대가 그립다 (my translation - "Even when you are at my side, I still miss you").