The nineteenth century was a barren period for Korean poetry. Tasan Chŏng Yag’yong (1762-1836); Kim Ryŏ (1766-1822); Shin Wi (1769-1845) and Kim Sakkat (1807-1863) were among the last of the hanshi poets to leave a distinguished body of work. Shijo was also in decline. Chungin (a rank between yangban and commoner) and sŏ’ŏl (sons of yangban fathers and non-yangban mothers) dominated the shijo stage. Pak Hyogwan (1781-1880) and An Minyŏng (1816-1895) are prominent examples of these poets of lesser rank. Yi Sebo (1832-1895), a member of the royal Yi family, and a prominent official in Kojong’s government, was the last great yangban shijo poet. By far the most prolific poet in the genre, with more than four hundred poems extant, he was forgotten by the time the shijo revival started in the 1920s, a telling indicator of the esteem in which vernacular poetry was held at the end of the nineteenth century. Chŏng Pyŏng’uk’s celebrated Shijo sajŏn does not list a single Yi Sebo poem.
Something was radically wrong in nineteenth century Korean poetry consciousness. In fact, something had been wrong since the founding of Chosŏn. Neo-Confucian didacticism had been allowed to obliterate the lyric voice of Shilla and Koryŏ. In the middle of the dynasty there was a movement against Neo-Confucian poetry values. Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s teacher, Ki Taesŭng (1527-1572), emphasized the role of chŏng (feeling) in the poetry experience. In the age of T’oegye such ideas were revolutionary, heralding a return to the poetry values of Tang. Later, Hŏ Kyun (1569-1618), Pak Chiwŏn (1737-1805) and Pak Chega (1750-1805, 1815?) reacted against slavish imitation of Chinese masters and called for greater personal creativity. Shirhak (Practical Learning) brought with it a movement away from poetry to prose as the mode of literary expression. There was an increased interest in the vernacular, particularly in kasa and the new sasŏl shijo, which were both prosy poetry forms. The sasŏl shijo introduced the wry, sardonic, and sometimes scatological humor that is so typical of Kim Sakkat. It is noteworthy that his most collected poem is the awful “Execrating the School,” which Richard Rutt in the 1970s considered to be in such bad taste that he resorted to Latin for a translation, with uproarious, though probably unintended, comic effects. Rutt’s mictus canis would have made Kim Sakkat spill his makkŏlli.
The popularity of the sasŏl shijo perhaps also accounts for the way Kim Sakkat seems to make fun of the hanmun tradition by interlacing vernacular effects with the Chinese characters. There are a few Kim Sakkat ŏnmun poems extant, but no shijo, sasŏl or otherwise, surprising in view of the effects his poems assay.
There is no reason to believe that Kim Sakkat was interested in the nature of the lyric voice, or that he had any critical interest in the direction hanshi composition was taking. No critical comment survives other than his admission of the worthiness of No Chin’s poem on the debacle of Grandfather Kim Iksun. The weakness of the three monarchs in the first half of the nineteenth century and the turbidity of the times left little room for preoccupation with literary matters. Political survival was uppermost in everyone’s mind.
What are the criteria by which Kim Sakkat’s oeuvre is to be judged? Shin Sŏg’u’s judgment in Haejang chip is negative; he finds that the poems, perhaps because of the uncontrolled anger festering in the poet’s heart, lack traditional elegance and break the rules of traditional composition. He recognizes a great inherent talent but says it was wasted. Yŏ Kyuhyŏng’s opinion in Hajŏng chip is even more downbeat. The poems, he says, are like a leaning rice barn. They lack the fluent interplay of tension and release that is characteristic of good hanshi; they are without elegance or literary merit.
The traditional verdict of crank and maverick still seems to weigh heavily on scholars today who find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. The traditional judgment is negative, but Kim Sakkat is an icon of popular culture, and scholars do not want to portray themselves as radically out of tune with the flow of popular culture. They realize that Kim Sakkat cannot be ignored, but under the weight of the traditional verdict, they hedge on the question of whether he is a maverick or an innovating genius, with the pendulum tending to swing in the maverick direction. Hanmun teachers, on the other hand, do not discuss Kim Sakkat’s accomplishment at all. When the old sŏdang style teachers in Chongno wax eloquent on the delights of hanshi, Kim Sakkat’s name does not come readily to their lips. You have to ask for an assessment. The replies are guarded. Most of them seem to regard Kim Sakkat as a talented manipulator of the characters whose finest skills were seen in his punning on the vernacular, which puts him several notches down on the scale of hanshi greatness, certainly not one of the great hanshi poets. They agree with Shin Sŏg’u that there is far too much han (bitter grievance) in Kim Sakkat’s poems to allow him to attain Zen freedoms, a view not without some substance.
We are left with a conundrum. Here is a poet who manipulates the characters with a genius never before seen, who sometimes writes in accordance with the norms of Modern Style, which is great, and sometimes totally disregards the tradition, which is terrible, and who seems, horror of horrors, to be trying, consciously or unconsciously, to marry Chinese and the vernacular. The vernacular in Kim Sakkat’s time, as we have noted already, was still called ŏnmun, vulgar language, fit for women and those who had not the benefit of a formal classical education.
Seamus Heaney makes a distinction in English poetry between craft and technique, craft referring to the nuts and bolts of poetry practice, technique referring to the heart of the poet. According to Heaney, anyone can learn the craft of poetry. Technique, however, he says, cannot be learned; it is a spiritual quality that allows the poet as prophet to see into the nature of things. Either you are born with it, or you must learn to do without it. Many poets have outstanding craft skills but are weak in technique; many more have excellent technique skills but little craft. To excel in both craft and technique is the mark of a great poet.
The first step in a critique of Kim Sakkat’s oeuvre is to examine the poems in craft terms. Despite the early negative views of Shin Sŏg’u and Yŏ Kyuhyŏng, and despite the negativity of scholars and hanmun teachers, there is a popular consensus that Kim Sakkat was formally masterful, perhaps the greatest manipulator of the characters in the history of hanshi, a poet who turned the tradition on its ear. Much of this adulation, however, comes from Kim Sakkat’s anti-establishment folk status and from endless repetition of praise through the generations by commentators who have not really examined the poems.
“Song of Orchid Hill” is Old Style. One would be tempted to categorize most of the other poems in this collection as Modern Style—they are almost all in either eight or four line format, and with two exceptions they are in five or seven syllable lines—but there are so many exceptions to the rules of Modern Style that one cannot make such a blanket categorization. Sometimes the rhymes sound fine in the Korean, but when you look them up in the rhyming dictionary, they do not match. Much of this may have been deliberate. Very often tones match for the most part, but then a line or a character will break pattern. Again this is possibly deliberate. Because of the way Kim Sakkat approached the poet’s task, the notion of craft excellence should not be restricted exclusively to how well he observed the rules of Modern Style. A broader focus is necessary, one that embraces what is new in his oeuvre. Kim Sakkat’s poetry revolution—if one may use the word revolution to describe an approach that was inspired more by a sense of fun than any desire to create a new prosody—introduces the sound values of vernacular Korean to the composition of hanshi. This adds a new dimension to prosody, perhaps taking his oeuvre outside the tradition. It should be noted that many poets in Kim Sakkat’s age and subsequently had fun in playing with the characters, but none of them dared put the results in a collection because “fun” poems were not treated seriously. Incidentally, this increases the chances of poems that are ascribed to Kim Sakkat being the work of other itinerant poets.
“Song of Right and Wrong” tears the tradition to shreds. The first section features clever repetition of characters; the second section is a tour de force that only uses two characters 시/비 (shi/ pi). Surprisingly, Kim Sakkat while seeming to ignore the tradition maintains patterns of tone and rhyme throughout. There are also parallel patterns of repetition. In the first part, yŏn/yŏn/yŏn/kŏ (the years go) and mu/gung/kŏ (inevitably they go) is followed by il/il/ il/rae (the days come) and pu/jin/rae (inexorably they come). The effect is that of a folksong in hanmun.
Year by year, the years go, inevitably they go.
Day by day, the days come, inexorably they come.
The years go and the months come in a flurry of come and go,
genesis of time in Heaven, of human affairs on earth.
That right is right and wrong is wrong is not indubitably right;
that wrong is right and right is wrong is not indubitably wrong;
that wrong is right and right is wrong is just conceivably right;
that right is right and wrong is wrong is both right and wrong.
This is completely at odds with traditional hanshi composition but innovatively brilliant.
There are doubts about whether “Up on the Roof,” a six character poem with twelve repetitions of the “go” (chi) character, is really the work of Kim Sakkat. It can hardly be termed Old Style, and it is certainly not Modern Style or any other style. In an extraordinary display of virtuosity, the “go” character appears in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th positions in each line. The chi (ji) sounds in the final line, in particular, sa/ji/no/ji/tal/ji give the feeling of a Korean poem, almost like a child’s poem in six-syllable fun rhythm. The poem in effect is the equivalent of broken Chinese.
Up I got, I got right up, I got right up on the roof.
I got up there to get a bird, but in the getting up,
a tile got loose, got knocked, got smashed.
The master got angry; got his whip; and I got beaten.
“Making Fun of a Monk and a Scholar” runs a coach and four through the rules of classical poetry. It is built around the four end line characters—(testicle) rang, (penis) shin, (pot) chŏng and (gruel) chuk. These key characters do not rhyme, but rang and shin have their own semantic harmony (testicle and penis) as do chŏng and chuk (pot and gruel). The third line features six -ng sounds that dramatize the rattling of the copper beads in the pot; the fourth line has six hard k sounds that depict the pepper eyes of the protagonists. This is Kim Sakkat at his outrageous best, introducing vernacular sound effects to hanshi composition.
The monk’s head is round as a sweaty horse’s testicles;
the head of the literatus is pointy as a dog’s prick when the dog sits.
Their voices—copper beads rattling in empty copper pots;
their eyes—black pepper grains plopped in white gruel.
“Deconstructing the Characters” again demonstrates Kim Sakkat’s mastery of craft. Unfortunately, without being able to visualize the characters, you cannot appreciate the poet’s sense of fun in breaking the characters down into their semantic components.
An Immortal is a mountain man; the Buddha is no man at all.
The goose is a river bird; how can a hen be a bird?
Ice loses a dot when it melts—it’s water again.
Two trees face to face make a wood.
Each line takes a character and deconstructs it. The immortal character is made up of mountain and man; the Buddha character combines man and anil not; the goose character is river plus bird; the hen character is how plus bird; the ice and water characters differ by a single stroke; the wood character is two trees. The cho/rim rhyme does not work and tonal pattern in the last line is deflected/deflected/level whereas it should be deflected/level/ deflected.
“Bamboo Poem” is built on eleven uses of the chuk (bamboo) character. In Korean, bamboo is “tae,” but Kim Sakkat interprets “tae” in its other Korean meaning of “as it is” or “unchanged,” “what will be, will be” in the translation. He breaks free of classical convention and creates a new world of poetic possibility in Chinese and Korean. Read in Korean the poem gives the rhythm and feeling of a folk song, something like the effect of the refrains in Koryŏ kayo. (차죽피죽화거 죽，풍타지죽낭타죽，반반죽죽생화죽, 시시비비부피죽) Knowledge of Korean is essential to understand the poem. A Chinese reader would not get the bamboo “as it is” references.
Things come, things go; what will be, will be.
Winds blow, waves break; what will be, will be.
Rice is rice; gruel is gruel; take what you get; what will be, will be.
Right is right, wrong is wrong; accept it; what will be, will be.
Hospitality for a guest? Let the pocket decide what will be.
Trading in the market? Let the times decide what will be.
The affairs of the world are not under my control; what will be, will be.
So, so, so! That’s the world; go with the flow. What will be, will be.
Hilarity is not usually listed as one of the qualities of hanshi, but hilarity is very much a Kim Sakkat quality as evidenced by this version of a much quoted poem, “Under Twenty Elms,” which tries to take into account the puns of the Chinese on the Korean:
Under (twenty) fucking elms, (thirty) miserable guests
in (forty) wretched houses were served (fifty) bowls of rotten rice.
(Seventy curses!) How could this happen in the world of men?
Better go home and eat (thirty) bowls of half-cooked rice.
It doesn’t seem much in English, but it is enormously clever in the way it uses the characters. The pun on ship (ten) and the vulgar sship in iship (twenty) is a good example of Kim Sakkat craft. Tonal patterns are not maintained and the shik/shik, rice/rice rhyme does not work. The poet’s bitterness dominates the tongue-in-cheek, high moral tone of the conclusion.
We have seen some of the new craft elements in Kim Sakkat’s poems. However, he also wrote poems that follow all the rules of Modern Style. “Singing of My Rainhat” is an example of seven-character Regulated Verse that is perfectly realized. Tonal patterns are observed; the rhymes are (chu/ch’u/ku/nu/su); and the second and third couplets feature verbal parallelism.
My airy rainhat is an empty boat;
worn once it’s mine for forty autumns.
The tousle-headed cowherd, lightly clad, tends his calf;
the old fisherman shows his true self when he follows the gulls on the sand.
Drunk, I doff my hat and admire the flower trees.
When the mood comes, hat in hand, I climb the terrace to view the moon.
For worldlings, formal dress is a matter of looking right.
Me? I haven’t a worry, not even when wind and rain fill the sky.
“Met the Rain: Spent the Night in a Farmhouse” is another fine example of seven-character Regulated Verse. Tonal parallelism is maintained. The rhyme is chin/shin/shin/shin/in. The three shin characters are different: body (shin), unfold or stretch (shin), and dawn (shin). There is verbal parallelism in the second and third couplets: all my life/ tonight are parallel, as are bow/ stretch/. In the third couplet, rat holes/ window are parallel, as are smoke comes in/ followed by blocked with straw. Also in the third couplet everything black/ no day are parallel expressions.
The rafters are twisted; dust is stuck to the eaves;
the space is so tight I can barely squeeze my body in.
All my life I’ve tried not to bow;
but tonight I cannot even stretch my legs.
The smoke comes in through the rat holes; everything is lacquered black.
The poky window is blocked with straw, there is no burgeoning day.
Still my quarters kept the damp off clothes and hat;
I’ll say a quiet word of thanks to the master as I leave.
“Blue Mountains Are Upside Down in the Water” maintains the tonal patterns and rhyme (hoe/rae) of Modern Style:
Sky gleam and cloud shadow slip back and forth in
the bowl on the four-legged pine table.
Master, don’t say you’ve lost all face;
I love the blue mountains upside down in the water.
An insensitive host might not even be aware that he is under attack here. As a poem “Untitled” does not reach any great Zen heights, but sky gleam, cloud shadow and inverted mountains in the soup show the well-sharpened knife of the satirist.
The commentators point to realism as among the felicities of Kim Sakkat’s poems, and they cite the titles—“Flea,” “Piss Pot” and so on as evidence. This kind of realism is neutral as a marker of poetry quality. It was part of the charm of Yi Kyubo’s poems seven hundred years earlier and is commonly found in the poems of the Song dynasty in China. The poet’s eye for detail is a much more important marker of realism. “Cold Plum in the Snow” is a good example of accurate observation. The images work through striking contrasts between flowers, trees (plum, willow, chestnut, pomegranate) and living objects (kisaeng, monk, terrier and rat).
Cold plum flowering in the snow—a tipsy kisaeng; wind-
dried willow—a monk reciting a sutra;
falling chestnut flower—the stubby tail of a terrier;
new flower on the pomegranate—the pointy ear of a rat.
Kim Sakkat’s audiences expected, indeed demanded, exotic, even outrageous work. Once when asked to write something outrageous as the price of an evening’s drinking, he came up with “Lies.” One can imagine the hilarity with which it was greeted. The egregious third and fourth lines should not distract us from acknowledging that this is a tour de force in paradoxical writing:
A roe broods on an egg in blue mountain shade;
a riverbank crab wags its tails under white clouds;
the monk going home in the setting sun has a topknot three feet long;
the girl weaving on the terrace has balls as big as a measure of rice.
Neither tone nor rhyme patterns are observed. The cleverness of this poem lies in the accuracy of the poet’s observation. The shadow cast when a roe lies down in shade makes it look as if it were brooding on an egg; the riverbank crab has tail like protuberances that wag like tails; the evening sun gives the impression of a long topknot; the shadow cast by the girl working on the loom gives the impression of a penis.
While many Kim Sakkat poems are very sharply observed, they make no attempt at social realism. There is no sense of Korean life in the early nineteenth century, no feeling of being on the road, lodging in filthy inns, engaging with people and culture. The poems are peopled by caricatures: stingy sŏdang teachers, mean yangban, lazy women, and pretentious monks. Satire is the central thrust in Kim Sakkat’s work. The commentators treat him as a mythical folk hero, always in tune with the needs of the people, always ready to humiliate an arrogant yangban, a stingy sŏdang teacher or a supercilious monk. He is often presented as an amalgamation of several folk figures rolled into a single anti-establishment symbolic entity. Satire is more at home in romance and p’ansori than in hanshi. Ŏnmun and entertainment are satire’s bedrock. In the English tradition, satire rarely scales the heights of great art. There are exceptions, of course. Pope and Swift are master satirists; as is Joyce in writing of his beloved Dublin, and Yeats’s greatness is predicated on the angry satire of his later poems. Kim Sakkat’s satire has little in common with the satire of Joyce or Yeats or for that matter with the satire of Pope and Swift; it is more in the tradition of Irish Gaelic poets penning their disgust at the inhospitality they have been accorded by people who ought to know better. This is poetry of such narrow focus that one does not expect to find lyrical greatness.
We have seen that Kim Sakkat is a formidable manipulator of the characters. In craft terms he is superb. But how does he measure up in a critique of technique? What Heaney means by the heart of the poet translates as Zen in East-Asia, meaning not so much a Buddhist principle as a razor sharp intuition into the nature of things. There is so much han and anger in Kim Sakkat that Zen only raises its head at irregular intervals. But when it does, it reveals an outstanding poet. “The Diamond Mountains,” a seven-character couplet, is a radical departure from the tradition, but anyone who ever tried to write a poem will marvel at its accomplishment. Kim Sakkat begins with two red pines—songsong—followed by two white pines—-paekpaek; then two rocks—amam—and the character to wend among—hwe. That is half the couplet. The second half begins with two waters—susu—and two mountains—sansan—followed by the everywhere character twice—ch’ŏch’ŏ-—and the wonder character—ki. This is the poem:
Red pines, white pines; I wind my way between the rocks,
the world full of the wonder of mountains and waters.
Interestingly, while the couplet does not figure in Modern Style poetics, the tone pattern here is:
level /deflected /level
deflected/level/deflected
Presumably Kim Sakkat is playing once again with the tradition. Kim Sakkat is not usually a great purveyor of the wonders of creation, but this magically clever poem is full of Zen. In between the lines he excoriates the ignorance of the yangban, but the indirection of the attack and the core symbolism of wood, stone and water elevate the poem to a new level.
“Song of the White Gull” is another poem strong in Zen symbolism. It does not maintain tonal patterns and the ku/ku rhyme is not in accord with the norms of Regulated Verse.
White sand, white gull—white, both white.
Sand and gull, white, indistinguishably white.
The fisher’s song flies suddenly in air
and sand is sand and gull is gull again.
Sand, gull and song blend into an exquisite symbolic whiteness that expresses the essential harmony of nature.
The love poems show Kim Sakkat’s softer side. “Presented to a Kisaeng” is particularly striking.
At first we found it difficult to relate;
now we are inseparable.
Wine Immortal and town recluse get together;
heroine and poet are one at heart.
We’ve pretty well agreed on love;
a novel team we make—moon, she and me.
We hold hands in moonlit East Fortress;
tipsy, we drop to the ground like plum blossoms in spring.
Tonal patterns are maintained. The rhyme syllables are ch’in/in/ shin/ch’un. There are verbal parallels in chu-sŏn (wine Immortal) and yŏ-hyŏp (lady heroine) and between shi-ŭn (town recluse) and mun-in (literary person, translated here as poet).
Are the scholars and hanmun teachers wrong? Is Kim Sakkat a great poet? The evidence is incomplete. We need a collected poems volume that meets standards, and we need Korean scholars to make a thorough evaluation of the poems. Kim Sakkat’s craft, however, is beyond question. He was a master of Modern Style. He introduced Korean sound values to hanshi poetry with wonderful comic effect. He used processes of deconstruction in playing with the characters that show new facets of composition skills. Finally, there are a number of poems, admittedly small, that meet the highest standards of technique.
Making the translations has been a great joy. Kim Sakkat presents challenges I have not previously encountered in forty years of translating classical and contemporary Korean texts. The poems are radically different, not only in the way they use the characters but also in the poetic sensibility they generate. Trying to convey in the English the skill and sensibility of Kim Sakkat has been an enormous challenge. Many around me said it could not be done. Let the reader be the judge.