A poet whose later years are barely known

In any talk of modern Korean poetry, the writer says, Baek Seok is a name one can hardly leave out. Yet there is not much about him that has been firmly checked. After independence he went home to Jeongju; after the Korean War his trail is poorly known.

He is said to have gone on writing in the North, to have translated Pushkin, and to have died in 1995 at eighty-four. That, the notes say, is about all that is known of him after the war. The year stays in 1995. Because he remained in the North, his name once grew faint in the South. That the poems can be discussed freely is, the writer adds, a fairly recent thing.

The thinness of the record, oddly, gives the poems more room. With other poets one can lean on essays and statements of method; here there is almost nothing of that kind, so reading rests on the reader’s own sense. The poems can feel like an unknown country, and also like a place where the reader is freer than usual.

Natasha, a white donkey, and snow that changes its work

In one poem the speaker loves a woman called Natasha, feels he cannot be happy with her in the life he has, and imagines walking a snowy road into the hills on a white donkey. Who Natasha is, the notes say, we cannot really know. She may be a woman the poet loved; she may also stand for the world he wanted in a hard colonial time.

He drinks soju and dreams of a modest happiness the two of them might share, even without much in the way of things. Early on, snow falls thick and he sits alone with the drink; the snow, the writer thinks, makes a hard life harder. Later the same snow falls, beautiful Natasha loves him, and somewhere a white donkey will cry in the night because the night is good — and the snow has become a beautiful ground for a hard life, not only a weight on it.

For a poet who lived in North Pyeongan, snow was a familiar thing, and in one work he lets the word carry both sides. Folk and dialect diction — thick-falling snow, a low crying, a soft coming, the donkey’s cry — keeps a Korean feeling around the foreign name Natasha, and makes a poem that is at once traditional and modern. Independence, the writer reads, felt as hard to hold as Natasha herself, and the white donkey belongs to the same wish: an ordinary Joseon life, once that hard thing had come.

The monologue of an old reed

The Monologue of an Old Reed already tells you, from the title, that the voice is a quiet speaking to itself. The scene is a reed field as the sun goes down. Most of the lives in that field, at that hour, talk sadly of growing old, and sing the song of the years.

At the centre is the reed. It speaks to a moorhen back in a strange paddy, to a shrimp on a dry leaf, to the river and the moon, about days that held love, family, passion and youth. Those things appear only as a story of the past; they are not here now. The reed does not only mourn. It looks at the marks left on its body and remembers that past as love.

The same Korean assignment, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student reading of Baek Seok’s life and poems, including a poem with Natasha and the white donkey, and The Monologue of an Old Reed.
2. A reported death in 1995 at the age of eighty-four, left in that year, and a faint trail after the Korean War, as the notes present them.
3. Folk diction and the double work of snow, as the writer hears them in the poems.

Last updated: 14 November 2026