Sense of Place: The Korean Peninsula

Ko Un claims to have been born, firstly, as a mare near the Caspian Sea in 1125 B.C. In A.D. 1402, he says, he was reincarnated as a peddler in Samarkand and, half a millennium later, after stints as a firewood collector and an "innkeeper in an unknown land," he says he was born the eldest son of a farmer in Gunsan, present day South Korea, in 1933. Walking home from school one day in that "obscure corner of the world" — then like the rest of the country under Japanese colonial occupation, but now a drab port with an American Air Force base nearby — the shy and sickly teenager stumbled across a volume of work by the poet Han Ha Wun lying in a roadside ditch. He devoured it, decided that "to be a poet was freedom itself" and went on to become his nation's preeminent living bard, a singer of democracy and reunification with North Korea. Whether or not you believe his tales of reincarnation, what is certain is that Ko is a master chronicler of the Korean landscape. He explores his country like no other, and his collected poems beat any Lonely Planet guide in their survey of the land.

During the Korean War, Ko was forced to cart away corpses. After, he became a Buddhist monk and wandered over the vales and hills of South Korea, a "nation of unending waves!" For 10 years he lived off alms, often sleeping in graveyards and caves. He also published his first poems, which he has since likened to "tufts of grass among the ruins" of the fratricidal war — a typically earthy metaphor for a poet derided by his detractors as artless and quaintly rustic. The landscapes in his poems are undeniably folksy. Villagers get drunk on bootleg makgeolli — the milky, fizzy rice wine making a comeback in South Korea these days, thanks in part to a national grain surplus. Surprised burglars are spotlit by incandescent moons. Young lovers do amorous things in barley fields while dogs couple in dusty streets. Fauna make their appearance throughout Ko's work — he jabbers lovingly with crabs and cuttlefish and applauds croaking frogs and other critters. "Accept my respects, uncle boars," he offers in one poem. In another, he consoles an insect who shares his sunless cell at Seoul Prison: "I'm awake so I'm your comrade."

That complex, known as Seodaemun under the Japanese who built it in 1907 to incarcerate Korean independence fighters, and where Ko spent much time for his leading role in protests against successive military governments in the 1970s and '80s, has been turned into a museum of horrors, a red-brick Grand Guignol of simulated torture chambers as chilling as Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh or Changi in Singapore. To visit is upsetting but essential if you're to see Korea the Ko Un way — that is, an experience of harmonious extremes, a bracing yin and yang of Buddhas and booze, temples and taverns and, if you've scored a visa to Pyongyang, visits to both sides of the 38th parallel.

An iconic photo has Ko sandwiched between Kim Jong Il and South Korea's late President Kim Dae Jung, the friend and former jail mate for whom Ko penned an encomium included in Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), his 30-volume magnum opus profiling everyone he's ever met, as well as figures from Korean folklore and history. The three are toasting each other at a state banquet during the first Reunification Summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, during which Ko recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after a ramble around the Hermit Kingdom the year before, heralded the future of the North Korean capital as a lepidopterist's playground that would be the envy of Nabokov: "Fifty years from now," Ko wrote in his 1999 collection Abiding Places, "May this be a city where window-glass butterflies/ Swallowtails, orange tips, duskywings, skippers, blues/ Mourning cloaks, awlets, dryads, ahlbergia & red admirals fill the air."

A mad prophecy for sure, but daydreaming is the prevailing ideology in Ko's republic of verse. "I want us to understand/ That what can be salvaged from our suffering/ Is not in the shadowy hands of our religious philosophies/ But in the charge of stars, flowers/ & the blaze of autumn color," he writes in "Crimson Leaves," also from Abiding Places. The poem describes the annual turning of maples across the entirety of the Korean peninsula, from the Tumen River bordering China to Naejang Mountain in Ko's native North Jeolla province and on to Cheju Island. By early December, when I arrive at Naejang Mountain to trace Ko's footsteps up Seoraebong Peak, the famed red foliage — for Ko an arboreal emblem of a unified land and people — has all flamed out. The ground is a pulp of mud and fallen leaves. But it's all good. Crunching through hoarfrost with the poem in my pocket, I'm sure that somewhere north of the DMZ somebody else must also be cursing the cold.

Got an awful travel gripe? The Avenger may be able to sort it out for you.