Pomegranate & other poems - by Kim Myeong-sun

Pomegranate & other poems - by Kim Myeong-sun

Pomegranate & other poems - by Kim Myeong-sun, translated by Sean Jido Ahn

Kim Myeong-sun was born in 1896 in Pyongyang, Korea. She debuted in 1917 when her short story A Girl in Doubt appeared in Youth [Chungchun]. In 1919, while she was studying abroad in Tokyo, she joined Korea’s first literary circle Creation [Changjo], which is reputed as the harbinger of modern Korean literary style. She published her first book of poems The Fruit of Life in 1925, which is also the first book of poems published by a Korean woman. Kim was known as quinti-lingual, and she introduced works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire to Korean readers for the first time. Along with the literary movement, Kim was also a central figure in the feminism movement of her time. She argued that the world would achieve peace rather than war if women could play a major role in sociopolitics. Moreover, she openly supported free love, and her practice of free love subjected Kim to severe criticism. The fact she was a date rape victim and a daughter of a courtesan hardened the criticism, even among the writers who were close to her. After she fled to Tokyo in 1939, her mental health exacerbated due to extreme financial hardship, failed relationship, and ongoing criticism, and Kim spent rest of her life in Aoyama psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. While her year of death is known to be 1951, this date is not officially verified.

(Biographical Source: Sean Jido Ahn)

A note about the translator

Sean Jido Ahn is a literature student and a translator residing in Massachusetts, USA. His main focus is Korean to English translation, and he has translated a documentary, interviews, journal articles, and literary pieces. Currently, he runs a poetry translation blog AhnTranslation  and plans to publish the first edition of a literary translation quarterly for Korean literature in fall 2017.

Pomegranate & other poems by Kim Myeong-sun, translated by Sean Jido Ahn were published on Poethead on 19/02/2017

Online URL: https://poethead.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/pomegranate-and-other-poems-by-kim-myeong-sun-translated-by-sean-jido-ahn/

Kim Myeong-sun, Sean Jido Ahn

Poethead, Ahn Translation

Poethead, Chris Murray

2017 -

Kim Myeong-sun, Sean Jido Ahn

Poems © Kim Myeong-sun,
Translations © Sean Jido Ahn

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