Free Maninbo by Ko Un

longer wept.
    His brows were bushy.
    He did not weep even when, much later,
    in a printing shop, his finger was severed by the cutter.

Old Sim Yu-seop
    War widows need their smokes.
    When you miss someone, you have to have a smoke.
    When the person you miss has disappeared,
    you have to have a smoke.
    Widows, and widowers must develop a taste
    for tobacco.
    Friends separated forever from friends
    must develop a taste for tobacco.
    One nation was divided into two.
    The moment of division,
    the two became enemies.
    Naturally,
    inevitably,
    absurdly,
    war broke out.
    For a few months the front line moved ever farther south.
    It engulfed even the west of South Gyeongsang province.
    The American fighter planes changed abruptly:
    one moment, Second World War propeller-driven Grumman Hellcats;
    the next, jet-propelled Sabers.
    Then the front line shot up northward.
    More and more North Korean troops retreated.
    At first, the North’s advance had been unhindered,
    now the advance by the South was unhindered.
    The whole country was turned into scorched earth
    from carpet bombing by the US Air Force.
    Who among us had wanted scorched earth?
    Was it ruins
    we so ardently desired?
    While the fighting moved up
    and down,
    the rice was ripening
    in the fields round Jochiwon, South Chungcheong province.
    Sixty-five year-old Sim Yu-Seop,
    having given his paddy fields a triple summer weeding,
    was waiting wordlessly
    for the autumn harvest
    His heart was entirely given over to his two sons.
    While the country changed names,
    from the Republic of Korea
    to the People’s Republic,
    and then from the People’s Republic
    back to the Republic of Korea,
    his elder son was a soldier for the South,
    while the younger had gone off to volunteer for the North.
    Even when the dog wagged its tail,
    Old Sim’s lips wouldn’t open.

    Soon he’d be marking the third anniversary of his wife’s death.
    He felt lonely, he whose old nickname was ‘thin-as-a-post’.
    More than himself,
    his shadow was ‘thin-as-a-post’.
    In all his sixty years
    he had only ever told three or four lies.
    He, too, needed to chain-smoke:
    cigarettes rolled from dried tobacco leaves.

The Lake
    I grew up in the Bujeon Highlands, South Hamgyeong province.
    If I climbed over the mountain, panting,
    I could gaze down at Bujeon Lake.
    I wanted to stand there
    forever
    like the trees, like the dead trees there by the lake.
    And I wanted my dead friend Jin-man
    to come stand with me for a really long time.
    The lake was a place the spirits of the departed visited.
    At the time of the January 4 Retreat
    when tens of thousands were swarming southward,
    I was lucky to manage to embark on an American navy LST,
    a 100-to-1 chance, 150-to-1.
    Tens of thousands who failed to get away were without hope.
    Surrounded by anxiety and fear, I rode all the way down to Busan.
    I became a night worker on number 3 dock in Busan,
    then a deliveryman for a Chinese restaurant,
    a carrier of relief goods at Gukje Market,
    a gangster,
    a jailbird doing time for violence,
    a gangster again.

    Once only did pure passion erupt from deep in my heart:
    I fell in love with Miss Kim who worked in a tea-room
    and gave her a gold ring for her birthday.
    After I went to jail
    she disappeared somewhere,
    Seoul, perhaps,
    or Dongducheon.
    Throughout those hectic days,
    steadfast was my own Bujeon Lake,
    which lay behind me,
    beckoning me to come,
    come back, quickly.
    I lost my left arm in a gang fight in Nampo-dong, Busan.
    I am called Left-armed Yeong-nam.

Despair
    On October 5, 1950, when Seoul was recaptured
    after three months’ occupation by the North,
    hope was everywhere.
    By a low shack where the stream’s murmuring was always heard
    outside of north Jaha Gate, Seoul,
    surely the apricot trees would blossom next spring?
    The daughter of that house, as she lay in bed sick,
    was raped by a man in a UN jacket.
    She collapsed,
    the man spat, then vanished.
    On roadside telegraph poles, flyers were