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Book Review

Ten Thousand Lives: Maninbo, Volumes 1-10

Kyoto Journal, 2007 Number 67

Reviewed by Patricia Donegan

Ko Un's Poem Portraits

Aunt
That aunt of ours
who married the man at Sorae Ferry
Aunt Ye-bok
her laugh
a laugh like cold bean-sprout soup
Aunt Ye-bok
that cold aunt who had wept her fill.

Looking away from the war-torn images of bombings and horrific violence on my TV screen, out the window I see the vast blue sky, the primordial empty space beyond concept or thought. In the Buddhist tradition this is called ‘Buddha nature’, our natural state of mind which is luminous, open and compassionate. A magnificent reminder of this “sky mind” in the midst of the world’s chaos is the Korean poet Ko Un’s book, Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives). 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. He is able to be Chae-suk, ‘the girl from the house by the well, a brimming crock of water perched on her head, gazing into the far-off distance as she walks; he is able to be Uncle Man-sik, ‘someone like watered wine, so insipid he even bows down before kids’; he is able to be six-year old Pyong-ok, ‘rushing out to the rice-paddy foraging for snails half a day who drank lye by mistake and died.’ He is not just ‘able to be’ but rather ‘he is’ that person, for he has stepped beyond duality into the realm of feeling one with other. This is a direct result of his early life of extreme poverty and hardship during the oppressive Japanese Occupation and horrific Korean War, plus his later years of confinement & torture as a political prisoner, but most of all a result of his living as a Zen Buddhist monk for many years before settling into a married family life. He has expressed his passionate political & humanistic views through his prolific works of more than 100 books.

He told me in an interview [see Kyoto Journal 60], of the epiphany he ‘saw’ in his mind while in prison: “The idea of Maninbo came at a very difficult point of my life. In May 1980 I was arrested and going to be court-martialed by the emerging dictatorship, accused of “rebellion”… in the military prison if the single weak electric bulb went out, it was a black room, so we were full of fear, for we felt we might be killed at any moment — and the thought that really sustained my life at that moment was that if I were to get out of there I would have to write these poems [of the images of the faces of everyone he had ever known]; I thought even if I didn’t do that thought in itself would be a source of strength…

These poems represent my ‘other-centered’ poems. So much modern Korean poetry is centered on the self … I have many other kinds of works, but if Maninbo were not in my body of work, somehow I would have failed in my task, not only in the matter of depicting others, but also in the way of somehow transcending self. ” So far he has done twenty volumes of the intended 25 of these portrait poems; more are in process, most likely continuing to the poet’s last breath. This particular collection in-translation contains selections of poems from the first ten volumes, published for the first time in English; thanks to these fine translations, we now can read some of this most ‘ordinary-extraord