Cheon Sang-byeong (1930 – 1993) was a South Korean poet.
1. Life
Cheon Sang-byeong was born in Japan on January 29, 1930. He immigrated to Masan, Korea in 1945, after Korea was liberated from Japan. It was then that the 15-year-old Cheon began writing poems in the language of his ancestry. In July 1949, he published his first poem, "Gongsang" (공상 Daydreams) in Juksun magazine, followed by "Gangmul" (강물 River Waters) in Munye magazine upon the recommendation of the poet Yu Chi-hwan.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he served as an interpreter to the US troops for six months. He entered Seoul National University in 1951, during which time he published a literary magazine called Sinjakpum with friends such as Song Yeong-taek.
Cheon's literary debut was completed in 1952 when his poem "Galmaegi" (갈매기 Seagull) was published in Munye magazine. The following year, Cheon published a critical essay, "Sasirui hangye: heoyunseongnon" (사실의 한계: 허윤석론 The Limits of Reality: On Heo Yun-seok), in the same magazine, followed by others, including "Hangugui hyeonyeokdaega" (한국의 현역대가 Modern Masters of Korea) in Hyundae Munhak in 1955.
In 1967 Cheon was implicated in the East Berlin Spy Incident and jailed for six months, during which he was brutally tortured. Cheon was scarred from this experience for the rest of his life, unable to father children and dependent on alcohol. Found unconscious on the street, Cheon was institutionalized and his friends, believing him to be dead, published a posthumous book of his poetry. Cheon, however, recovered to enjoy a prolific career.
2. Writing
Cheon Sang-byeong wrote his poetry with the intention of transcending the immediate world. He avoided artificial technique and excessive and decorative language and instead embraced raw emotion and unforced simplicity, and candidly explored weighty existential problems. His poetry was written in substantial and condensed language with scarcely an unnecessary or frivolous expressio to detract the reader's attention from his objective as the writer: to scrutinize and divine the origin of the universe, the existence of life after death, and the reason for human suffering.
His most famous poem, "Gwicheon" (귀천 Back to Heaven), speaks of a man's encounter with the afterlife and his journey from life to death, as a passing from one world to another: "I'll go back to heaven again./At the end of my outing to this beautiful world/I'll go back and say: That was beautiful. . ." [1]
Cheon remained consistent and faithful to his ideal of writing poetry that aspires to surmount the vortex of this superficial and empirical reality to reach a higher plane of thought and feeling, without the assistance of sentimental frippery or romantic trappings to embellish his work. About his approach to poetry, Cheon wrote: "I consider poetry to be the king of literature...By that I mean that poetry is the truest of all...We cannot live if we abandon truth. Joy is one expressio of truth. I love to laugh. The critic Kim Ju-Yon once commented that he could not help laughing when he read my work...You and I are all living for the sake of truth. The truth about human existence lies spread far and wide. What gives it expressio is poetry. If you get angry after reading a poem, it must have been a fake! I never write poems like that. More and more with the passage of time I have tried to express the true meaning of human existence."[2]
Reference
[1] Ch’on Sang Pyong, et al. Back to Heaven: Selected Poems of Ch’on Sang Pyong. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University East Asia Program, 1996.
[2] http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/ChonNotes.htm
