RP 2 Munkhbat 1

Mandakh Munkhbat

Annie McKnight

CPLT 023

December 26, y

Avante-garde poems; The price of Alienation

Kim Hye-kyong, widely known as his pen name Yi Sang, left behind a handful of a

unique and influential body of work during his short period of life. He is one of the most

influential figures of the colonial era and modern literature of Korea. He was born a month after

Korea signed the annexation into the Empire of Japan, which lasted for thirty-five years. Yi

Sang's life was entirely spent under the Japanese authority, and he died of tuberculosis in

1937(when he was 27) shortly after getting arrested by the Japanese police. His studies were

taught and done in Japanese, and he was only allowed to publish in Japanese. He never felt

belonged neither in his country nor in the world, and his writings reflect his alienation. 

During his lifetime, Yi Sang was aspiring to create his own language and tried to find a

place to belong. He was trying to translate his experience of existence into the form of writing.

Sawako Nakayasu writes in our reading that "his poetic use of the colonial language manifests an

internal and intralingual translation of sorts, taking place even before the moment of writing."

(81). For him, it created a unique approach to writing which is a symptom of a colonized subject.

She then goes on and says “He wrote in Japanese a locale outside of it, Yi Sang mirrors the

position of the translator being on the outside of an “original” text(or language), while on the

inside of the new “translation”(or language). Desire and opposition embed themselves into this

third space between languages. (82). He then populated this third. The conventional and ordinary

language was insufficient to express his colonial existence. He twisted and transformed syntaxes
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and words in his own way and produced awkward and unconventional phrases. He drew heavily

from algebraic characters and formulas. His background in architecture influenced his visually

striking poems. Agreeing with Mrs. Nakayasu's saying, Yi Sang occupied this third space

between the languages, filled with his personal vocabularies and formulas. 

Yi Sang manipulated language in his way to express his ideas. However, it failed to give

me comfort and a place of belonging. The regime of the Japanese Empire was harsh towards the

Koreans. Yi Sang, in his journey to find home, put up a rebellion in his writing. Mrs. Nakayasu

mentions it by saying, “Yi Sangs’ poems are conversant with those of the Japanese modernists,

but through them, he also repurposes the tools of the avant-garde as instruments of rebellion.”

(83). When the katakana script was majorly used for foreign words and the hiragana scripts for

the native words, he intentionally used them in the opposite ways. He tried to convert what

would be foreign into native and native into foreign. Unfortunately, the Japanese police arrested

him for ideological crimes in 1937.

For his whole life, he lived as a colonized subject who had to use the mandated foreign

language as his means of communication. Yi Sang tried to mix up everything he could conjure

up which would sufficiently express his incongruous existence. He reconstructed the Japanese

language in the level of formation of words and syntaxes as well as infused it with his

architectural design and algebraic characters. The result is his unique poetry and the body of

work that influenced modern Korean literature.