Everything Yearned For: Manhae's poetry of love and longing
Everything Yearned For: Manhae's poetry of love and longing
$29.95
Awaiting stock, will ship in 10 – 15 business days
ISBN / SKU
9780861714896
Format
Hardback
Pages
150
Dimensions
187 x 162
Category/ies
Description
Manhae (1879-1944), or Han Yongun, was a Korean Buddhist (Son) monk during the era of Japanese colonial occupation (1910-1945). Manhae is a political and cultural hero in Korea, and his works are studied by college students and school children alike.
Everything Yearned For is a collection of 88 love poems, evocative of the mystical love poetry of Rumi, and even reminiscent of the work of Pablo Neruda.Though Manahe's poetry can be read allegorically on many levels—political and religious—it is completely unlike any other poetry in Buddhist or secular realm.
The first poem, "My Lover's Silence," narrates the lover's departure and establishes the enduring themes of the work: The happiness of meeting, the sadness of separation, the agony of longing and waiting, and, most of all, the perfection of love in absence that demands the cost of one's ongoing life, as opposed to the relief of death. The Korean word translated in these poems as "love" and "lover" is nim, though nim has many and broad interpretations. Understandably, the identity of Manhae's lover, or "nim" has been the subject of much speculation.
Manhae writes in his own preface:
"Nim" is not only a human lover but everything yearned for. All beings are nim for the Buddha, and philosophy is the nim of Kant. The spring rain is nim for the rose, and Italy is the nim of Mazzini. Nim is what I love, but it also loves me. If romantic love is freedom, then so is my nim. But aren't you attached to the lofty name of freedom? Don't you also have a nim? If so, it's only your shadow. I write these poems for the young lambs wandering lost on the road home from the darkening plains."
PRAISE
"Hot, hot poetry from a Korean master. It's cause for celebration when one book can brighten so much darkness. Francisca Cho's definitive translation of Manhae's The Silence of Everything Yearned For is a revelatory experience, a wonderful journey to the heart of the heart, gently and wisely guided by a true master. This is the only book-length collection of poems ever published by Manhae (the pen name of the revered Korean activist-monk-poet Han Yong-un). Manhae not only bore witness to the history of his time but also took a leading part of it. . . Cho's indispensable English-language rendition also includes several chapters of skillful commentary on the poems' interwoven topics of Buddhism, activism, and love. In its mode of variations on a central theme - that of love - EVERYTHING YEARNED FOR speaks to us more deeply than any linear narrative might. Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus comes quickly to mind, also Whitman's original Leaves of Grass and Tagore's Lover's Gift. .. . "
—Tricycle
"Manhae's deceptively simple ecstatic poems draw on a tradition that goes back thousands of years. Manhae joins to that tradition his Korean Buddhist sensibility and practice, and considerable technical skills, producing a suite of poems of striking originality."
—Sam Hamill, founder of Poets Against the War and author of Dumb Luck
"This book is amazing."
—Andrea McQuillin, editor of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly
"A wonderful, wonderful book. These poems remind me of Rilke and Tagore. I love that you can't tell whether they are erotic, religious, political—or all three at once! They penetrate your heart like a gong at midnight."
—Andrew Schelling, Naropa University, author of Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Ecology, Asia, Poetry.
"Discover Manhae's poetic genius in Cho's superb translation."
—Mu Soeng, author of The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World, and Trust in Mind: The Rebellion of Chinese Zen
"Francisco Cho has provided the definitive English translation of these remarkable poems. Manhae's long rhythmical lines seem to sweep forward with an almost Biblical cadence in some places, while in others breaking apart into brief, almost conversational phrases. Their mix of the philophical, mystical, and sensual are uniquely distinctive. A WONDERFUL VOYAGE AWAITS YOU. "
—from the foreword by David R. McCann, recipient of the Manhae Prize for Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Korea Insitute at Harvard University
"Intense and poignant. Love takes Manhae, and the reader, to a place of awareness that he understands is a dream within a dream; but one with a tang of relative truth about it - the extremes of bliss and despair, a paradigm of duality."
—DharmaLife
Everything Yearned For is a collection of 88 love poems, evocative of the mystical love poetry of Rumi, and even reminiscent of the work of Pablo Neruda.Though Manahe's poetry can be read allegorically on many levels—political and religious—it is completely unlike any other poetry in Buddhist or secular realm.
The first poem, "My Lover's Silence," narrates the lover's departure and establishes the enduring themes of the work: The happiness of meeting, the sadness of separation, the agony of longing and waiting, and, most of all, the perfection of love in absence that demands the cost of one's ongoing life, as opposed to the relief of death. The Korean word translated in these poems as "love" and "lover" is nim, though nim has many and broad interpretations. Understandably, the identity of Manhae's lover, or "nim" has been the subject of much speculation.
Manhae writes in his own preface:
"Nim" is not only a human lover but everything yearned for. All beings are nim for the Buddha, and philosophy is the nim of Kant. The spring rain is nim for the rose, and Italy is the nim of Mazzini. Nim is what I love, but it also loves me. If romantic love is freedom, then so is my nim. But aren't you attached to the lofty name of freedom? Don't you also have a nim? If so, it's only your shadow. I write these poems for the young lambs wandering lost on the road home from the darkening plains."
PRAISE
"Hot, hot poetry from a Korean master. It's cause for celebration when one book can brighten so much darkness. Francisca Cho's definitive translation of Manhae's The Silence of Everything Yearned For is a revelatory experience, a wonderful journey to the heart of the heart, gently and wisely guided by a true master. This is the only book-length collection of poems ever published by Manhae (the pen name of the revered Korean activist-monk-poet Han Yong-un). Manhae not only bore witness to the history of his time but also took a leading part of it. . . Cho's indispensable English-language rendition also includes several chapters of skillful commentary on the poems' interwoven topics of Buddhism, activism, and love. In its mode of variations on a central theme - that of love - EVERYTHING YEARNED FOR speaks to us more deeply than any linear narrative might. Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus comes quickly to mind, also Whitman's original Leaves of Grass and Tagore's Lover's Gift. .. . "
—Tricycle
"Manhae's deceptively simple ecstatic poems draw on a tradition that goes back thousands of years. Manhae joins to that tradition his Korean Buddhist sensibility and practice, and considerable technical skills, producing a suite of poems of striking originality."
—Sam Hamill, founder of Poets Against the War and author of Dumb Luck
"This book is amazing."
—Andrea McQuillin, editor of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly
"A wonderful, wonderful book. These poems remind me of Rilke and Tagore. I love that you can't tell whether they are erotic, religious, political—or all three at once! They penetrate your heart like a gong at midnight."
—Andrew Schelling, Naropa University, author of Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Ecology, Asia, Poetry.
"Discover Manhae's poetic genius in Cho's superb translation."
—Mu Soeng, author of The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World, and Trust in Mind: The Rebellion of Chinese Zen
"Francisco Cho has provided the definitive English translation of these remarkable poems. Manhae's long rhythmical lines seem to sweep forward with an almost Biblical cadence in some places, while in others breaking apart into brief, almost conversational phrases. Their mix of the philophical, mystical, and sensual are uniquely distinctive. A WONDERFUL VOYAGE AWAITS YOU. "
—from the foreword by David R. McCann, recipient of the Manhae Prize for Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Korea Insitute at Harvard University
"Intense and poignant. Love takes Manhae, and the reader, to a place of awareness that he understands is a dream within a dream; but one with a tang of relative truth about it - the extremes of bliss and despair, a paradigm of duality."
—DharmaLife
Reviews