Yi Won
(South Korea, 1968)   
 
 
 
Yi Won

Yi Won, born in 1968, grew up in Seoul, where she studied literature and obtained her doctorate with a thesis on the modernistic Korean poet Oh Kyu-Won. Her poetry first appeared in magazines in 1922; in 2002 she received the annual award from the Korean journal Modern Poetry. She currently works as a part-time university lecturer. Among the visual artists she most admires are George Segal and Francis Bacon.

The Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad once wrote that in Korea the sixteenth and twenty-second centuries go hand in hand. And indeed, the title of Yi Won’s second collection, A Thousand Moons Are Floating in the Yahoo River!, published in 2001, is a word-play on The Moon, Reflected in a Thousand Rivers, a classic Korean text dating from the fifteenth century, a biography of Buddha written by King Sejong. The title of Yi Won’s first collection from 1996, When They Ruled the Earth, recalls a distant past while playing on the title of a Korean gangsta-rap hit. By and large, in Yi Won’s poetry the modern world of commerce and wall sockets goes hand in hand with ancient buddhist lore. She likens the Internet to a desert, not, however, as a symbol of utter desolation: the Chinese Mogao caves she mentions in her poem ‘I click, therefore I am’, which are situated close to a desert on the Silk Route, contain over a thousand Buddha statues. The Silk Route, which features in another poem, this time in the guise of a metropolitan thoroughfare, was the route travelled by Boddhidharma when he brought Buddhism to China and, eventually, Korea. Thus modern technology turns out to be a journey past caves holding images of the Buddha, places to lose one’s self in. In all this, however, she keeps a critical distance, finding it, a she says in her first collection, ‘like my house, strange’. Yi Won’s poetry, a space between embracing and rejecting, will thrive on that distance.

[Yi Won took part in the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2004. This text was written on that occasion.]

© Lucas Hüsgen (Translated by Ko Kooman)

 




Subscribe to the newsletter

follow us on facebook follow us on twitter Follow us (international)  

follow us on facebook follow us on twitter Follow us (Dutch)