Kevin O’Rourke
KYUNGHEE UNIVERSITY, SEOUL
ISBN 978-1-901903-29-4 - 144pp - Case
March 2005 - £30.00
| KEY FEATURE(S): The first collection of its kind
rendered in English translation contains a hundred
Korean poems and introduces the full gamut of the
classical genres, including hanshi (poems in Chinese
characters), hyangga and Koryo kayo (the earliest
Korean vernacular forms) and shijo and kasa (the
vernacular verse forms of the Choson dynasty)
which modern scholars believe best represent
Korean sensibility. |
Translator Kevin O’Rourke is a distinguished Korean Studies specialist and author of over twenty books on Korean literature in translation. Korea's traditional love poetry is little known in the Western world. The poems run the gamut of the Korean classical genres. Love Poems includes shijo, a short lyrical song form, often compared to the Japanese haiku but actually very different, and kasa, an unusual essay-song form for which English poetry has no equivalent. A witty, informative commentary links the poems against a background of dynastic upheavals, ideological changes and fluctuations in poetry practice.
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