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Ko Un is without doubt the best-known Korean writer in the world. This is mainly due to his personal vitality and to the impact he makes when he speaks or reads, even though his audience may not know a word of Korean. He is one of the very rare Korean poets able to read his works with a charismatic passion and communicate warmly with those around him. His exceptional poetic sensitivity is the key. We who translate his work cannot hope to match his intensity, though we strive to keep up with him.
I first met Ko Un in 1991 when I began translating some of his poems. I had been living in Korea for more than ten years by then. In 1993 Cornell University's East Asia Series published those translations, the first volume of English translations of Ko Un's work, as The Sound of My Waves. The selection ended with several poems from the first three volumes of Maninbo. In 1996 Beyond Self, a translation of 108 Zen poems, was produced by Parallax Press, with a preface by Allen Ginsberg. In 2005 Green Integer produced a selection of our translations from volumes 1-10 of Maninbo as Ten Thousand Lives. Also in 2005, Parallax published my co-translation of Ko Un's great Buddhist novel, Little Pilgrim. Other verse collections include Flowers of a Moment, What?, and Songs for Tomorrow, and Himalaya Poems is forthcoming from Green Integer. Ko Un's work has been translated into at least fifteen other languages, with a total of over thirty translated volumes published worldwide so far, and many more have been announced.
The genesis of Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) arose at a key moment of Ko Un's life. He was born in a small village near Kunsan in the southwestern Cholla region of Korea in 1933. During the Korean War, overwhelmed by the atrocities and violence he had witnessed, he became a Buddhist monk. His first poems were published in the late 1950s in the Buddhist Newspaper he had helped found. They provoked intense admiration. In the 1960s, having left the monastic life, he went through years of intense nihilistic anguish. After a failed suicide attempt in 1970, he discovered a new vocation in the campaigns for a return to democracy...