On August 1st, 1933 Korean poet Ko Un began a life that would become one of the most remarkable in Korean history. He was born during the Japanese occupation, lived through the Korean War, thorough two military dictatorships, and the democratic movements that brought them down. He was imprisoned four times, attempted suicide three times, was a ordained as a Buddhist monk who traveled the country begging alms, only to give it all up for drink and self-torture, which he survived to become a militant nationalist. He wrote over 140 books by hand without a typewriter or computer, won dozens of literary prizes, traveled the world teaching and reading, and has visited North Korea nearly a dozen times as President of the Joint South-North Editorial Committee for the Compilation of Grand Korean Dictionary. And he’s still only 77.

Born in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, to neither rich nor educated parents, Ko had mastered classical Chinese by the age of 8 and learned to read and write Korean in secret despite the Japanese laws against it.

His life changed dramatically when he found a copy of the book by the well-known leper poet, Han Ha-un, on his way home from school. “My breast seemed torn apart by the force of the shock those lyrics produced on me”, he says, and knew from that moment on that he wanted to be a poet.

But Ko was emotionally and physically traumatized by the Korean war which was to come. A war that caused the death of many of his relatives and friends.  He saw rape and murder on both sides and finally resorted to pouring acid in his ears to “block out the noises of the world gone mad” after being forced to carry a corpse on his back for days.

Before the war ended, Ko became a Buddhist monk and spent the next ten years in Zen meditation traveling the country begging for alms. In 1962 he published a “Resignation Manifesto” in the Hankook Ilbo and left the Buddhist community behind to the shock of his compatriots. He entered into a period of nihilism and self-loathing, and headed to the South Sea to commit suicide. In a stroke of serendipity, he passed out after drinking heavily to get the courage to go through with the act, and woke up on Jeju Island. Ko ended up living in Jeju-do for three years and set up a charity school, but by 1970 he returned to Seoul where he was again plagued by his demons, and attempted suicide for the second time.

He survived his second attempt and joined the democracy movement to fight against the Yusin Constitution put forth by The Fourth Republic of Korea. The movement was led by Park Chung-hee the authoritarian dictator who would later be assassinated by his own chief of security (the story was made into the 2005 film “The President’s Last Bang”).

Between 1974 and 1989, Ko was Secretary-General of Writers for Practical Freedom and was persecuted by the KCIA. He was imprisoned four times where he was beaten and tortured repeatedly. By May 1980, in the wake of the coup d’etat led by Chun Doo-hwan after the Gwangju massacre Ko was accused of treason and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

Ko married in 1983 and since then has spent his time writing, traveling and lecturing in relative calm. He is currently the President of the Joint South-North Editorial Committee for the Compilation of Grand Korean Dictionary, a group working throughout the peninsula compiling a definitive dictionary of the Korean language.  He now lives in Anseong, Gyeonggi-do and has just completed a novel called “Forest of Ideas”.

A collection of his poems “Songs for Tomorrow” is available in translation from the publisher.

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