I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet who was in jail had been imprisoned for a violation of the publishing law because he’d printed a book-length poem about a farmers’ revolt in 1947 on an island on the southern tip of Korea. It was a sensitive subject. Korea, as you know, was occupied by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945, and no society is ruled by an invading power for that long without a lot of collaboration and bad conscience. I helped translate the peroration of his long poem, working in a hotel room between convention sessions with a very brave and intelligent Korean poet. “And so,” it began, as I recall, “the authorities who were the running dogs of Japanese imperialism / changed their uniforms and became the running dogs of American imperialism / I write this down in 1986 when the blood of Korea cries out / and the tears of Korea burst forth.” The language of the literal translation sounded to me like the slogans one saw on the banners at student demonstrations. My cotranslator had expressed no opinion about the quality of the poem. I asked him if its language was interesting in Korean. He smiled at me, nodding, as if he had an amused, distant recollection of the state of mind in which one might ask such a question, and then shrugged and said that the language had a certain vigor.

It is a sort of kore myth transposed upward, a Gnostic retelling in which the love of life, the moment of its blossoming and ceremony, traps us

"Elbows off the table!” A cheerful and peremptory call to manners that has vast stretches of childhood in it.