rePlacing Kim Ki-rim in the Natural World

Such was the morning to which Kim Ki-rim awoke, born to a world of rapid change and encroaching predators. But he was also born into a dark day for Korea in which Korean men were subjugated to the Japanese world order. In response to this, Korean poets emphatically embraced their Koreanness by writing in the vernacular and attempting to break free of the restraints of the old ways of Choson with a grasp at modernism in poetry. Kim Ki-rim was such a poet, who looked toward achieving a new imagery in poetry that could prove Korean to be as diverse and beautiful as the languages of the western modernists.

With the rise of modern poetry, grammar virtually vanished and the reader is left to imagine, imply and infer the meanings through suggestions, carefully constructed often with allusions to their plight under the foul rule of the Japanese. These feelings could not be expressed for fear of retaliation so the poets took to expressing their national resistance by writing about man’s place in nature and about the sufferings of rural societies. Kim Ki-rim drew for us pictures of man still close to nature with illusions to the powerlessness and vulnerability of Koreans in the Japanese colony.

Following the massacres of 1919 and the failure of the march first movement to generate sufficient international notice of Korea’s plight, the people’s predominant sentiment developed into a dreary lingering despair. Kim, like many other poets of his time, wrote in such a mood while feeling his way down the road in a bitter storm. While several of his poems have promise, I found many of them to be variously grammatically incomprehensible, often awkward and at times overly simplistic. In “The Sea and the Butterfly” such language enters the fold…

“The Rock” further exemplifies the simple choices of his speech patterns that might reveal something more with some coaching…

The trouble of a translation is that it is limited by the words of the original and yet the translator is sometimes allowed a bit of leeway to interpret and add to the rhythm, flow and color of the language. If we take such translator’s license, the poem might transform in English from a Rock to a Boulder in a step beyond what Kim may have intended…

The hopeless bitterness of the message comes out with more force. Koreans “Solitude”, similarly holds for us (and for Koreans of the time) little hope for the future…

A step in a new direction takes us on a tour of words…

With “The Waiting Room” we finally see some hope for the future steal into the fold. What was it that came on that train that brought forth such optimism? Love, no. Maybe a new ideal or a bit of desirable news, a novelty, a digression, a venture, an endeavor, who knows…

A more careful step forward, even within the realm of reason…

In the end, the poems of Kim Ki-rim strike one as having a fresh sense of image as he creates pleasant pastels of the Korean landscape, his allusions, though lacking in depth and his use of words could be coaxed into more colorful rhythms and tighter stylistics. To an outsider, Kim’s poetry seems a bit self indulgent and 좀 유지해요. And again with the March to Sunday we see the experimentation of a youthful poet in need of the tides of time to come out with truths that make a poem a work more than just an exercise…