Han Yongun’s The Silence of Love
Love is gone, gone is my love.
Tearing himself away from me he has gone
on a little path that stretches in the splendor of
a green hill into the autumn-tinted forest.
Our last oath, shining and enduring
like a gold-mosaicked flower,
has turned to cold ashes, blown away
in the breath of wind.
I remember his poignant first kiss and its memory
has wrought a complete change in my destiny,
then withdrawn into oblivion.
I hear not his sweet voice; I see not his fair looks.
Since it is human to love, I, alert, dreaded a
parting to come when we met.
The separation came so suddenly
it broke my heart with renewed sorrow.
Yet, I know parting can only destroy our love if
it causes futile tears to fall.
I would rather transfer the surge of this sorrow
onto the summit of hopefulness.
As we dread parting when we meet, so,
we promise to meet again when we part.
Though my love is gone, I am not parted from love;
an untiring love-song envelops the silence of love.
The Silence of Love is one of the poems published in Han Yongun’s first volume of poetry, Nim ui Ch’immuk (The Silence of Love, 1926). This collection contains 88 poems invoking “Nim.” Nim literally means “a beloved one,” and for that reason, Han’s poetry can be read on the surface as romantic.
Considering the period when Han’s poetry was written, however, Nim may also have another layer of meaning: the motherland or freedom itself. When read this way, Han’s poetry comes to wear a shade of resistance. Given that Han was a Buddhist monk, Nim can also refer to the monk’s beloved Buddha, or to the “Buddhist Sutras,” which in turn would situate this volume in the category of religious poetry.
Then again, according to his note for The Silence of Love, Nim can virtually mean every animate and inanimate thing. He says, “Nim is not only a beloved one but also everything brought forth in the world. If common people are Nim for Buddha, philosophy is Nim for Kant. If spring rain is Nim for a rose, Italy is Nim for Mazzini.”
Han’s poetry requires a breadth of knowledge and an understanding of poetry’s way of developing multiple layers of coherent meaning. There is one basic premise, however, that links all the meanings of Nim in Han’s poetry, which is his Buddhist philosophical vision of the Huayan Doctrine.
Imported from India, the Huayan Doctrine has been creatively interpreted by many distinguished Buddhist monks throughout the history of Korean Buddhism. Han also approached the Huayan Doctrine in his own creative way (see Yim Sung-jeh).
According to Han, countless individual existences are closely intertwined with one another and manifest themselves differently each time. Han sees that it is impossible for one entity to have an absolute form of existence in a given time and space: everything in the world is constantly dissolving itself and transforming into another form.
Likewise, he presents Nim in this poem not as fixed but as changing from “love” to “old vow” to “flower of golden metal.” Thus, when in the opening line he says, “You have gone. Ah, my love, you have gone,” that remark does not necessarily set the tone of dejection and sadness caused by a lover’s absence. Rather, it leads the reader to learn the speaker’s negative capability in actively embracing the disappointment and helplessness caused by the lover’s absence.
Just as the speaker in the last line does “not let go of” Nim and expects the beloved to reappear in a different form, he suggests that the reader should not be disappointed, but instead wait for the day of reunion (whether when the lover returns, the country is at last liberated, or the subjects and objects of Nim are tenderly reconciled).
Clearly, the title poem in The Silence of Love is an excellent example of the core dynamic of Han’s poetry, which is to embody the constant alteration between reality and appearance based on the Huayan Doctrine. It leads readers to achieve a revolutionary perspective on contradictions in life, showing the various ways everything looks through enlightened eyes.
Bibliography
Kim Jaihiun, ed. and trans. The Silence of Love: Poems by Yong-un Han. Charleston, Ill.: Prairie Poet Books, 1985.
Solberg, Sammy E., et al., eds. The Silence of Love: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
Song Wuk. Anthology of Yong-un Han’s Poetry and Prose. Vol. I. Seoul: Shinkumunhwasa, 1973.
Yim Sung-jeh. “A Study of Yong-un Han’s Zen,” Ph.D. diss. Seoul: Yonsei University, 1995.
Categories: Korean Literature, World Literature