A review by arirang
Flowers of a Moment by Anthony of Taizé, Ko Un, Gary Gach, Young-Moo Kim
3.0
In the old days a poet once said순간 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.
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
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 rainsThe poems are un-punctuated, at least by comma and full-stop, and there is even a neat poem about that:
you too are enduring great trials
CommaWhile some poems touch on politics, particularly the plight of prisoners, others are relatively obscure and Zen-like and and would presumably repay meditative contemplation:
period
after forty-five sloppy years of mine
thank you
I promise never to put you to shame again
Remorse! Without it, what truth can there be?although even there the poet has a poem about the futility of struggling too hard with understanding:
Mid-November
Someone is standing by the sea at Taebu Island
at low tide
Scraps of trash drift by
Once you have cracked all 1700 koansMy personal favourite, because I love Jeju Island, at whose centre the dormant Hallasan lies, was this:
In the sky there will still be clouds
Longing to explode once moreAlthough 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.
Longing to be a sea of fire
Paeknok Lake in the crater of Halla Mountain
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").