Overview
For Nirvana features exceptional examples of the poet Cho Oh-Hyun's award-winning work. Cho Oh-Hyun was born in Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea, and has lived in retreat in the mountains since becoming a novice monk at the age of seven. Writing under the Buddhist name Musan, he has composed hundreds of poems in seclusion, many in the sijo style, a relatively fixed syllabic poetic form similar to Japanese haiku and tanka. For Nirvana contains 108 Zen sijo poems (108 representing the number of klesas, or ""defilements,"" that one must overcome to attain enlightenment). These transfixing works play with traditional religious and metaphysical themes and include a number of ""story"" sijo, a longer, more personal style that is one of Cho Oh-Hyun's major innovations. Kwon Youngmin, a leading scholar of sijo, provides a contextualizing introduction, and in his afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl reflects on the unique challenges of translating the collection.
Full Product Details
Author: Oh-Hyun Cho ,
Heinz Fenkl ,
Kwon Youngmin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 17.80cm
Weight: 0.255kg
ISBN: 9780231179904
ISBN 10: 0231179901
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 06 September 2016
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language: Korean
Reviews
In his Transator's Afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl describes his astonishing encounter with the poems in this collection-from dream encounter with the poet, to the poems, then the poet himself. Extraordinary workings of the three-line sijo form into the spaces of Zen practice, the poems call us to see! -- David McCann, Harvard University Reading Heinz Insu Fenkl's translations of the Korean poet Cho Oh-hyun's Zen sijo is like shining a light on a carefully cut, many-faceted stone. The poems are concentrated, understated, and effortlessly colloquial, both immediately accessible, and, paradoxically, mysterious. The Zen nature of the poems' inquiries and observations --- with their allusiveness and open-endedness --- bear up under many rereadings, defying prized Western rationality, and yielding a surprisingly rich range of tones, moods, and insights. In the non-dual world of Master Cho's poems, poet, translator, and reader are all pilgrims. A pilgrim asks the way and you draw him an empty circle, Fenkl writes. These sijo exist within that elusive and mysterious circle of significance. -- Elizabeth Spires, Poet and author of The Wave-Maker and Now the Green Blade Rises
In his Translator's Afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl describes his astonishing encounter with the poems in this collection-from dream encounter with the poet, to the poems, then the poet himself. Extraordinary workings of the three-line sijo form into the spaces of Zen practice, the poems call us to see! -- David McCann, Harvard University Reading these translations of Cho Oh-hyun's Zen sijo is like shining a light on a carefully cut, many-faceted stone. The poems are concentrated, understated, and effortlessly colloquial, both immediately accessible and, paradoxically, mysterious. The Zen nature of the poems' inquiries and observations-with their allusiveness and open-endedness-bear up under many readings, defying prized Western rationality and yielding a surprisingly rich range of tones, moods, and insights. -- Elizabeth Spires, poet and author of <i>The Wave-Maker</i> and<i> Now the Green Blade Rises</i> [Cho Oh-Hyun] has created a new tradition of Korean sijo poetry. -- Choi Yearn-hong * The Korea Times * While some of the poems embrace the kind of open-ended imagery commonly associated with Buddhist poetry, Cho innovates in this volume with narrative techniques that engage the senses and the imagination. * World Literature Today *
Author Information
Cho Oh-Hyun is in retreat at Baekdamsa Temple at Mt. Seoraksan. The lineage holder of the Mt. Gaji school of Korean Nine Mountains Zen, he received the Cheong Chi-yong Literary Award for Distant Holy Man in 2007, and translations of his work have appeared in Asymptote, the Buddhist Poetry Review, Asia Literary Review, Azalea, and the Adirondack Review. Heinz Insu Fenkl is associate professor of English and Asian studies at SUNY New Paltz. He is the author of Memories of My Ghost Brother and is working on a translation of Yi Mun-yol's novella Meeting with My Brother.
