Green Integer Series No.: 170
Pages: 365
ISBN: 978-1-933382-70-8
Price: U.S. $15.95*
*You can purchase online using Australian or Canadian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling or Japanese Yen
|
|
Songs for Tomorrow:
A Collection of Poems 1960-2002 Ko Un Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taize, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach, with an Introduction by Ko Un and a Translators' Introduction by Brother Anthony and Gary GachIn this long awaited full survey of the poetic writing of Korea's leading literary spokesperson, the translators have gathered poems from 42 years, representing numerous of the author's 135 books. As they note in their introduction, "Ko Un is...like a force of nature."
Born in 1933 in southwestern Korea, he grew up in a Japanese-controlled land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean War. In 1952 he became a Buddhist monk, and began writing in the late 1950s. Since that time, Ko has been recognized as one of the most notable of living Korean writers and has regularly been nomi¬nated and short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1982 Ko Un published his Collected Poems in Korea.
Green Integer previously published a selection from his Maninbo as Ten Thousand Lives in 2005. As John Feffer wrote of that book in The Nation, "Maninbo, his masterpiece, is the people made flesh. Thanks to Ko Un, they continue to walk among us, all 10,000 of them." As the Kyoto Journal observed "It is a monumental work of twenty-five volumes containing short poetic portraits evoking, one by one, the many people Ko Un has encountered in his life, beginning with his childhood village and expanding out to figures in literature and history. Ko Un is widely acknowledged to be Korea's foremost contemporary poet; yet he is not "the literary poet" using his art to put a grid of order unto chaos (which is ultimately too simplistic and dualistic a perspective), but rather he is able to see from a bird's-eye view, all perspectives, without superimposing any judgment, pity or revulsion."
|
Green Integer Series No.: 123
ISBN: 1-933382-06-6
Price: U.S. $14.95*
*You can purchase online using Australian or Canadian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling or Japanese Yen
|
|
Ten Thousand Lives Ko Un Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé,
Young-moo Im, and Gary GachBorn in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea's North Cholla Province, Ko Un grew up in a Japanese-controlled
land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean
War. He became a Buddhist monk in 1952, and began writing
in the late 1950s. Ten Thousand Lives is his major,
ongoing work which began during his imprisonment with his
determination to describe every person he had ever met.
Maninbo, as it is known in Korea, is now in its 20th
volume, and he has plans for five more volumes before its
completion. The selection in this volume—from the first 10
volumes—represents one of the major classics of 20th
century Korean literature, published for this first time
in English. Ko Un has been nominated several times for the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
|
