LEE SANG. Flowering Tree

LEE SANG

The writer generally known as Lee Sang was born Kim Hae-gyeong in Seoul in 1910 and was trained as an architect. During his short literary career he showed an interest first in poetry, turning out some highly idiosyncratic and experimental pieces, and then short fiction and anecdotal essays. In the fall of 1936 he journeyed to Tokyo, where he soon ran afoul of the authorities and was imprisoned. He died of tuberculosis in a Tokyo hospital in 1937.

His "Nalgae"(Wings, 1936) is one of the best-known modern Korean stories. Whether its read as an allegory of colonial oppression, an existential withdrawal from the absurdities of contemporary life, an extended suicide note, or simply the degradation of a kept man, it is strikingly imaginative.

Lee Sang was a writer ahead of his time. While his debt to Western and Japanese modernism is evident, recent scholarship has investigated the influence of traditional Korean literature on his work. Since the 1970s his critical reputation has soared. In the 1995 issue of the review Muae(U.S. edition), the translator of the poems published below writes: "Lee Sang characterized himself as split between 'the 19th century's solemn morality' and 20th-century modernity, labeling himself a 'vagrant who slipped into a crack between the centuries with the sole intent of collapsing there.' What this typically self-deprecating remark omits is his undaunted, far from vagrant development of a new, intensely melded Korean idiom that exploited the particular recursive possibilities of the language, as well as its compendious, richly nuanced lexicon. For all their pranks and provocations, the poems' underlying designs are deft explorations of patterns of repetition and divergence, identity and repression, desire and dissipation. Yi Sang's work stands as an important sign of the greatly underestimated range and vigor of Korean responses to the influx of modernist culture, both high and low."

Flowering Tree

Dead center of an open field there is a flowering tree. In the neighborhood

not even one That flowering tree with as much ardor as it thought about its

thought-about tree opened ardently its blossoms and stood It cannot go to

the tree it thinks about Wildly I fled For the sake of one flowering tree I

really went that far to make such uncommon mimicry.

⇐ Предыдущая 1 234 5 6 Следующая ⇒