Poet Kim Kwang-Kyu has been active in the Korean poetry scene for the last 40 years. We visited the poet at his home to hear his views on poetry and everyday life, poetic language and translation, and Korean and world literature.

Ahn Seohyun: I’m excited to have this little tête-à-tête with you in your own yard—this beautiful space where your touch and easy going nature can be felt in every nook and cranny. I’m looking forward to asking you a few questions and sharing a conversation with you about your life and poetry in this beautiful setting that perfectly matches the feelings evoked by your poetry.

You pioneered and established the category of “everyday poetry” in Korea. What significance does everyday life have in your poetic world? Even while dealing with the everyday world, your poetry doesn’t stop at middle-of-the-road descriptions. Instead it brings to life the tension between the everyday and philosophical thought through a fundamental introspection about language and existence. How do you maintain this balance?

Kim Kwang-Kyu: Everyday life holds a lot of hardship and suffering. Whether it’s the tedious repetition of making a living every day or the effort and patience required to endure an impoverished existence day after day. This everyday is the foundation of life. A life in which you put down roots, suffer, and persevere cannot possibly be detached from the day-to-day. Everydayness started appearing in Korean literature in the early 1960s after the emergence of the “4.19 Generation.”

I haven’t yet reached the stage where I can achieve a one-on-one balance between the everyday and philosophical thought. Everydayness is rooted in the concrete, while philosophical thought belongs to the abstract. Everydayness is inductive, while philosophical thought is deductive. When I write I always start from the reality and experiences of the concrete day-to-day. I strive to maintain a balance between the concrete and the abstract but in reality I tend to tilt towards the everyday.

Ahn: On reading your poems, readers get clues about certain thoughts and realizations drawn from everyday life since it is central to your poetry. You mentioned the 4.19 Generation. Are we to understand that this pursuit of everydayness is connected to you being part of that generation?

Kim: That’s right. The rise of everydayness is an important clue, whether in poetry or prose. Take novels for example. The petit bourgeois started appearing in the novels of the post-4.19 Generation instead of the heroic protagonists that appeared in earlier generations. A similar transformation of the poetic ego can be seen in poetry. Examples of such everyday poetry can be seen in my fourth poetry collection, Like Someone Fussing and Fretting (1988) and my fifth collection, Aniries (1990).

Ahn: Indeed, everydayness or petit bourgeois-ness is a significant characteristic of the 4.19 Generation. All of a sudden, I’m curious about your day-to-day life. Could you tell us about it through words instead of poetry? There has to be a certain distance between the everyday life of the poetic ego in your poetry and that of your true self.

Kim: I’ve been planting and nurturing each and every one of the trees here in this yard for the past forty-five years that I’ve lived here. This definite routine of life must have served as the foundation of my poetic ego.

I’m the head of a household who has been in the teaching profession for more than thirty years. I think this career is the foundation of my true self. Writing poetry and earning a living can be in conflict at times. On the other hand, there certainly is a gap between the poetic ego that appears in poetry—the poetic ego doesn’t necessarily appear as “I” but can take on plural forms like “he/she,” “we” or “them.” Rather, in poetry, “I” or “We” is a typified figure that observes me, the true self from a distance.

Ahn: You’ve been a student of German literature your entire life and have also translated German literature into Korean, so, consciously or unconsciously, a dialogue between translation and creation must take place inside you. Even if you weren’t influenced by a particular writer for example, your consciousness must have been influenced in some way, say, by the German pursuit of civil society. With German literature as the big Other, you must have written poetry that was “needed in this place” or “possible only in this place.”

Kim: I majored in German literature and have spent a lifetime teaching it, so it would be a lie if I said it didn’t influence me. Don’t writers, painters, and singers study under the masters? Artists seek out great teachers and learn from them, become influenced by them, and respect them as they would their own parents. But I wasn’t able to do that. I simply kept writing what I observed, read, and thought on my own. I have taught myself literature, so to speak.

I’ve written close to 800 poems, and have translated nearly 300 German poems. I worked hard on those translations. To translate poetry properly, you need to transfer both sound and meaning. It’s easy to transfer the meaning if you read the poem accurately, but it’s hard to keep the sound and meter intact. There were instances where it took me a week to translate a single piece of poetry. German literature has a lot of depth, and it’s like a dense primeval forest too extensive to be fully explored. I’ve concentrated on and researched and translated the works of 19th and 20th century German writers, especially Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Eich.

These three poets share a common trait in that they didn’t conform to reality. I was young at the time when I was first introduced to their works and took a liking to their poetry. The poems I translated from Heine’s Loreley were met with a great response in Korea. I even corrected many mistranslations that dated back to the Japanese colonial era. I translated Brecht’s Ich, der Überlebende in the mid-80s, but it was banned as soon as it came out. That was a time when our country’s political situation caused us to feel ashamed to be alive. A poet friend of mine remarked that reading the translations was like reading poetry by Kim Kwang-Kyu. It must be because I empathized with the original and then expressed it in my own poetic language.

Ahn: Let’s talk about the subject of language. Your poetry generally doesn’t extend beyond the scope of “everyday language,” which is why readers find your poems accessible. What is your idea of an ideal relationship between poetry and the reader or between the poet and the reader? Do you keep the reader in mind while writing?

Kim: Poetry is a textual tapestry created by weaving together meanings and sounds that are the warp and woof of language. The poem’s meaning is transmitted to and received by the reader who identifies with it. On the other hand, the poem’s sound resonates with the reader, for instance, through the meter. These effects can also make a difference in the life of a reader. It allows you to access different aspects of life like a new discovery of hidden beauty, or melancholic or remorseful ruminations.

I don’t write for just a select few readers but for ordinary people who share everyday life with me. The yardstick by which I chose the language or expressions of my poems is to create a text that can be read by anyone and not just a specialist. Poetry by nature is an attempt to express the inexpressible, so when you do manage to express something the reader should be able to decipher it.

Ahn: Writing simply might in fact be the hardest thing to do. A lot of labor must go into writing this way.

Kim: Some people say my poetry is “easy,” but as far as the writing is concerned, it isn’t easy. For a single poem, I can easily go through twenty drafts. Depth is as important as readability. It also isn’t easy to come across readers who can delve into the poem’s core.

Ahn: You’ve been marching to the beat of a different drum, making a difficult journey towards simple poetry. You’ve even coined rather profound and mysterious words, for example K’unaksan in “The Heart of K’unaksan,” that combine the sounds and unique sensitivity of the Korean language.

Kim: K’unaksan is a combination of the meaning and sound of Korean words that mean “big mountain,” “lofty mountain,” and “remote mountain.” There’s a sedentary bird in Korea called K’unak that belongs to the woodpecker family. It lives in the remote mountains. To wit, K’unaksan, or K’unak Mountain, is my name for a mountain where the trees grow thick, where the waters in the valley flow clear, where birds of all kinds chirp and tweet, and where the bear and fox live together. In fact, Prof. Kim Jae-hong’s Dictionary of Korean Poetic Words records K’unaksan as a word that appears in the poetry of Kim Kwang-Kyu.

Ahn: The place we are in now lies in the shadow of Inwangsan Mountain. This must be where “The Heart of K’unaksan” was born.

You’ve met lots of readers from all around the world. Can you tell us about any significant meetings or productive conversations you shared on such occasions?

Kim: My poems have been translated and published in ten languages. I’ve met with many different kinds of readers while attending book readings all over the world. The local media covered these events, and I was also featured in literary journals. The most important meeting place for a writer and his reader is the published book. When a work of fiction or poetry gets published, it leaves the writer’s hands and sets off on its own path. My first collection in English, Faint Shadows of Love, was published in London in 1991. After the book was published, I had no way to tell where or by whom it was being read. A few years later, I received a message from someone in the US informing me that one of the poems in the book, “The Birth of a Stone,” was going to be included in a collection of world lyric poetry. This meant that, without my knowing it, my book had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. In 2001, Scott Foresman Reading used the poem in its textbooks in Illinois. In 2013, “The Land of Mists” was broadcast as part of Poetry Please, a literary show on BBC Radio. The German translation of this poem was broadcast on Cologne Radio and Prague Radio. German translations of my poems, including “Evening Snow,” were displayed alongside German painter Hans-Christian Jenssen’s paintings in an exhibition in Zurich. They’re still displayed in Hotel Altstadt’s Writer’s Room. My poems have also been adapted as songs in Korea and Germany. Poetry has moved beyond the constraints of language and letters and is living in many different art forms in various countries. The meeting of the poet with his readers has moved beyond the pages of the book.

Ahn: These days, Korean literature, along with Hallyu or the Korean Wave, is coming into contact with people all around the world. As part of the original literary wave, what suggestions do you have for LTI Korea for the global promotion of Korean literature?

Kim: I wouldn’t say I’m part of the original wave. Korean literature had already started advancing overseas a century ago. Korean literature started being actively translated and introduced into foreign markets in the 1990s. A few cultural foundations paved the way in the initial stages, and, after its establishment, LTI Korea started actively supporting Korean writers and fostering translators, which has been a great help. It is important that we continue introducing our valuable cultural heritage to the world by translating our literature into foreign languages. For that, it is essential to widen LTI Korea’s sphere of activity and to expand its budget considerably. Exchanges between writers can be another way to gain a foothold in another country’s literary circle.

Ahn: Is there anything you would like to say to today’s young generation or young poets?

Kim: A poet is someone who lives with language and who cherishes his or her mother tongue the most. We have to hold fast to our love for our mother tongue. Language is facing destruction today. Advances in digital technology have given rise to textspeak, which is making intergenerational communication difficult with its absurd contractions and comic-book-style wordplays. People spit out crass slang and words that we wouldn’t have dared to even write, let alone utter, in the past and even use them freely in their literary works. We need to restrain ourselves from doing this if we love and cherish our native language. Literature is an art form that tries to convey something through the text, but literary works that are being published nowadays seem to have given up on conveying anything, and as a result do not communicate with the reader. We need to regain our powers of communication if general readers are to read and identify with our works and if our literature is to be translated into foreign languages. 

by Ahn Seohyun
Literary Critic

A tombstone inscribed with the poem "Epitaph"

The poet with his wife Chong He Yong