Word: ko
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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...
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...