Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Korean by Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz. In ABIDING PLACES, Korean poet Ko Un transfigures his homeland in lovely, observant, and penetrating poems uniting ancient and modern, secular and spiritual, art and politics, North and South. When his former political cellmate Kim Dae-Jung became president of South Korea in 1998, Ko Un became the first citizen from the South to be invited to tour the North. From that visit came this deceptively simple and deeply engaging book.
Author City: Anseong KOR
Born in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea's North Cholla Province, Ko Un grew up in a Japanese-controlled land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean War. He became a Buddhist monk in 1952, and began writing in the late 1950s.
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