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Life scrap

by Kim Nam Jogo link April 20, 2015

Author Bio 작가 소개

김남조

Kim Nam Jo

Kim Nam Jo was born in Daegu in 1927 and attended a girls’ school in Kyushu, Japan. She graduated from the College of Education at Seoul National University with a B.A. in Korean education. Kim made her literary debut with the publication of her poem, “Lingering Image,” in Yonhap News in 1950 and launched her career as a poet with her first collection of poems, Life in 1953. Kim’s poems express a subtle and feminine sensibility that carries on a lineage of female poets such as Moh Youn Sook and Noh Cheonmyeong from before Korean liberation from Japan. She is grounded in the Catholic faith and her writing gravitates toward the realm of love and life, with themes of maternity and peace. Her early works pay tribute to the dignity of life. In Life, she writes affirmatively about human nature and delineates the world of passion derived from the fullness of life’s vitality. In her collections A Flag of Sentiments and The Winter Sea, she refined her poetic world with increasing emotion. Her later works became more contemplative and explored the fundamental dimensions of humanism. The poet has confessed she received a mandate to delve into the depths of “love” and “poetry,” and accordingly, has chosen erotic and agape love as the themes of her recent poetic exploration and expression.With a voice emanating from deep within, Kim Nam Jo has sung about the ultimately positive aspects of life and achieved a beauty of both form and rhythm through fluid language. She has established herself as an eminent writer in Korean modern literature who has become renowned for her poetry about the inner strength that elevates the human spirit.Kim is at present a member of the National Academy of Arts of the Republic of Korea. The English translation of her poetry, Selected Poems of Kim Namjo, was published in 1993; the Christening of the Wind in Japanese in 1995; the German translation, Windtaufe, in 1996; and Antologia Poética in Spanish in 2003.

Life
comes with its cold body.
The winter barley growing stubbornly
from the naked, frozen ground,
Mother of life, even she
came with her cold body
from a distant place.

And truth, shattered,
also comes, burning in fire.
Tossed aside, bleeding,
it comes.
Behold the winter trees
that groom themselves with the razor of cold.
See the leaves that fall down and are called away
to the providence of future days,
and the branch, charged with electricity,
that turns to flint.

A person who does not know
how to love cracked or misshaped things
is not a friend
One who cannot kiss
the scarred and injured skin
is not a friend.
Life comes with its cold body.
Passing the twelfth portal
of cold, in the large flakes
of snow falling down white,
it comes

Writer 필자 소개

Kim Nam Jo

Kim Nam Jo

Kim Nam Jo was born in Daegu in 1927 and attended a girls’ school in Kyushu, Japan. She graduated from the College of Education at Seoul National University with a B.A. in Korean education. Kim made her literary debut with the publication of her poem, “Lingering Image,” in Yonhap News in 1950 and launched her career as a poet with her first collection of poems, Life in 1953. Kim’s poems express a subtle and feminine sensibility that carries on a lineage of female poets such as Moh Youn Sook and Noh Cheonmyeong from before Korean liberation from Japan. She is grounded in the Catholic faith and her writing gravitates toward the realm of love and life, with themes of maternity and peace. Her early works pay tribute to the dignity of life. In Life, she writes affirmatively about human nature and delineates the world of passion derived from the fullness of life’s vitality. In her collections A Flag of Sentiments and The Winter Sea, she refined her poetic world with increasing emotion. Her later works became more contemplative and explored the fundamental dimensions of humanism. The poet has confessed she received a mandate to delve into the depths of “love” and “poetry,” and accordingly, has chosen erotic and agape love as the themes of her recent poetic exploration and expression. With a voice emanating from deep within, Kim Nam Jo has sung about the ultimately positive aspects of life and achieved a beauty of both form and rhythm through fluid language. She has established herself as an eminent writer in Korean modern literature who has become renowned for her poetry about the inner strength that elevates the human spirit. Kim is at present a member of the National Academy of Arts of the Republic of Korea. The English translation of her poetry, Selected Poems of Kim Namjo, was published in 1993; the Christening of the Wind in Japanese in 1995; the German translation, Windtaufe, in 1996; and Antologia Poética in Spanish in 2003.

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