Kim Jong-gil (1926-2017) was an early-modern South Korean poet and translator.
1. Life
Kim Jong-gil was born Kim Chi-gyu in 1926, in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province. Kim Jong-gil was his pen name. In 1945 he entered the humanities section of Hyehwa College in Seoul, where he formed a literary club. Having begun to write poems, he made his official literary debut in 1947, when his poem "Mun" (문 Door) won the Kyunghyang Sinmun New Writer's Contest. In the spring of the same year, he transferred to the English department of Korea University, graduating in 1950. During the Korean War he served as an interpreter. He became assistant professor at Korea University in 1958.
In 1960 he spent a year studying at Sheffield University under the guidance of the celebrated critic William Empson. During this time he met T. S. Eliot and other well-known writers and critics. Returning to Korea University, he continued his academic career. In 1969 he published his first collection of poems, Seongtanje (성탄제 Christmas).
Throughout his career, Kim translated a considerable number of contemporary poems by Korean poets into English. These translations were published in various Korean journals but were never published as a separate collection. In 1987 Anvil Press published a volume of his English translations of Korean classical Chinese poetry, Slow Chrysanthemums.
He retired from Korea University in 1992, after which he was free to travel and give papers at various international conferences around the world. In 1993 he was elected a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. He was given the Inchon Award in 1996. In 1998 he received the Korean government's Silver Order of Merit for Culture. [1]
2. Writing
Kim Jong-gil's poetics are exemplified by a concentrated focus on maintaining clarity and lucidity, and by his skillful exploration of the power of the poetic image. The idea of imagery possessed for the poet a near transcendental value, which he believed could enable both poet and reader alike to attain a greater understanding of truth. His poetic methodology can be thus understood only in the context of his attitude towards life which functioned through the medium of clear, concrete images.
Kim's work successfully incorporated ideas heralded from Imagism, a modern poetic tradition espoused by poets such as Amy Lowell, HD (Hilda Doolittle), and Ezra Pound, and the traditional style of hansi and the spirit of seonbi. But unlike other imagist poetry of the time, Kim's works exude a classical or traditional elegance, which in turn endows the work with a sense of integrity and completion. This traditional elegance is most visible in the poet's emotional restraint and his detachment from the external world. In addition to this emotional restraint, the poet also focuses on the virtue of decency, as an effective means of conveying sorrow. In "Chaejeom" (채점 Marking), for example, the poet silently marks the paper of a student who has just died, and enters the grade in his report card. This unspoken sorrow and contemplation of death ultimately leads to a more understated and more powerful impact on the reader. Thus the most fundamental and important characteristic of Kim's poetry is in its extensive insight into life and the depth of the mind, through the cultivation of restraint, decency, and imagination.
Kim was the recipient of the 2007 Cheongma Literature Prize, the 2005 Yi Yuksa Poetry Prize, and the 2005 Kosan Literature Award.
Reference
[1] of Taize, Anthony (April 2, 2017). "Korea's most senior poet Kim Jong-gil dies at 91". The Korea Times. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2017/04/142_226797.html
