Abiding Places, Korea North and South

Poetry. Translated from the Korean. 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. Ko Un is Korea's most prolific living writer. He has published fifteen volumes of poetry and has twice won the prestigious Korean Literature Prize.

In Abiding Places, Korean poet Ko Un has transfigured his homeland in lovely, observant, and penetrating poems uniting ancient and modern, secular and spiritual, art and politics, South and North. When his former political cellmate Kim Dae-Jung became President of 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.
Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz provide lyrical and penetrating translations, and complement the poems with essential maps.

Ko Un is Korea's most prolific living writer. Born in colonial Korea in 1933, Ko Un has written 15 volumes of poetry and has twice won the prestigious Korean Literature Prize. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. In 1999, he was Visiting Research Scholar at the Harvard-Korea Institute.