Kim Kwang-Kyu grew up amidst the turmoil of the Korean War and its aftermath. He was born in 1941 in Seoul, and was a student at the time of the 4.19 Revolution in 1960. Kim studied German at Seoul National University as well as in Germany. He first developed his poetic voice by translating German poetry into Korean, including satirical works by Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Eich, before ever beginning to write his own poems. He only began to publish poetry in 1975, when he was already in his mid-30s. Owing nothing to standard Korean poetic models, his work enjoyed immediate popularity as a model of new poetics for the new age that began in earnest with the assassination of the dictator Park Chung-hee in 1979. Less than a week after Kim Kwang-Kyu’s first volume of poetry, The Last Dream to Drench Us, was published, the life of Park Chung-hee was brought to a violent end. Following this, Kim’s book was actively censored in the subsequent security clampdown, which only served to give it legitimacy as a work of resistance. For almost the first time in Korean literary history, a poetic voice characterized by satirical humor was speaking out, pointing its arrows at the evils of dictatorship and the wretchedness of modern city life in subtle, understated ways. Kim’s other early collections, written during the ensuing military dictatorships, include poems that refer indirectly to the brutality of the regimes, which delighted young readers capable of grasping their hidden meaning.In his work, Kim Kwang-Kyu is not interested in celebrating directly the beauties of nature, in part at least because he is very aware of the way human pollution has ruined them. He is one of the first Koreans to express alarm over looming ecological disaster. The voice of his poems often inspires a sardonic smile, but it is important to recognize in his work as a whole a deeply humanistic viewpoint. Kim Kwang-Kyu never speaks to draw attention to himself, but rather to raise questions about the way life is lived, or not lived, in today’s world. Kim Kwang-Kyu is still almost unique among Korean poets. He writes about topics that should make us want to weep in a way that often makes us smile.
1. Life
Kim Kwang-Kyu was born in Seoul and studied German language and literature at Seoul National University. Early in his university career, he participated in the demonstrations of the April Revolution that was repressed by a massacre on April 19, 1960, leading to the fall of President Syngman Rhee. He later studied for two years in Munich, from 1972 to 1974. He discovered a talent for writing during his middle and high school years when his works were published in school magazines and even won a national prize. However, he did not begin writing poetry until his return from Germany in his mid-thirties.
Kim's first poems, "Yumu" (유무 Existence and Absence ) and "Yeongsan" (영산 Spirit Mountain ) appeared in the review Literature and Intelligence in 1975, the same year in which he published Korean translations of poems by Heinrich Heine and Günter Eich. In 1979 his first volume of poems Urireul jeoksineun majimak jkum ( 우리를 적시는 마지막 꿈 The last dream to affect us) was published, for which he won the first Nokwon Literary Award. Over his career spanning more than 40 years, Kim has written approximately 800 poems and translated nearly 300 German poems.
Kim is professor emeritus at the German department of Hanyang University, where he has been working since 1980. He has published translations of 19th century German poems (1980), of poems by Bertolt Brecht (1985), of radio dramas by Günter Eich (1986), and of poems by Günter Eich (1987).
2. Writing
Kim's poems are characterized by a plainness of style and presentation close to prose, yet they never lose the essential poetic tension, thanks to their skillful use of irony and satire. He has written much poetry sharply critical of the abuses of human dignity caused by corrupt politics and the structural contradictions brought about by the industrialization of society. The censorship of his first collection, Urireul jeoksineun majimak jkum, following the assassination of Park Chung-hee, only served to give it legitimacy as a work of resistance. For almost the first time in Korean literary history, a poetic voice characterized by satirical humor was speaking out, pointing its arrows at the evils of dictatorship and the wretchedness of modern city life in subtle, understated ways. Kim’s other early collections, written during the ensuing military dictatorships, include poems that refer indirectly to the brutality of the regimes, which delighted young readers capable of grasping their hidden meaning. [1]
In his work, Kim is not interested in direct celebration of the beauties of nature, in part because he is very aware of the way human pollution has ruined them. He is one of the first Korean poets to express alarm over the looming ecological disaster. From time to time he writes poems indicating ways in which transcendent experiences can occur even to people living in the radically secularized and unreligious present. His delicate touches of humor distinguish him from most modern Korean poets.
Readers may need to be warned that the first-person speaker in his poems should not be identified with the poet, but rather a modern Everyman expressing in various ways the alienation and the bewilderment caused by modern city life.
The alienation is very often expressed through an ironic contrast between the present and the past, between nature and society, or between the rural and the urban. In many poems Kim refers to childhood memories of another, seemingly more human Korea in which, despite poverty, people were more attentive to each other and to fundamental values. This enables many Korean readers to sense his concerns very directly, as the majority of the poet’s own generation were born in rural villages before moving to the cities with their parents in the 1970s or 80s. Beneath his poems, illuminated by the gentle humor, there shines a glimmer of hope in a redemption—a sense that things do not necessarily have to be as bad as they are, that humanity has a possibility of making other choices, following other priorities. [2]
Reference
[1] Korea Literature Now. Author Profile. https://kln.or.kr/people/authorsView.do?writerIdx=179
[2] "Kim Kwang-kyu: Biography." http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/Kkkbio.htm
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