Park Chong-hwa


Park Chong-hwa was an early-modern Korean poet and novelist.

Biography

Park Chong-hwa was born October 29, 1901, in Seoul, Korean Empire. Park wrote under the name Woltan and attended the Huimun Uisuk Academy. He worked as a member of the literary club Swan and was the vice-chairman of the Choson Writers' Association in 1946. He also served as the Chairman of the Seoul Committee for Arts and the Writers' Association of Korea. Park was named the President of the Korea Arts Council and Chairman of the Board of the Korean Writers' Association. He died on January 13, 1981.

Poetry

Park first entered the literary world as a poet, publishing “Anguished Youth” and “Milk-colored Streets” in the inaugural issue of the journal Rose Village in 1921, and “Returning to the Secret Room” and “Elegy” in the 1922 inaugural issue of White Tide. With his first poetry collection, Private Melodies of the Black Room, Park established his reputation as a romantic poet.
During the Japanese occupation, censorship, prison, or even death followed overt literary resistance and the predominant emotion among Korean writers in the 1920s was near-despair. Poets like Pak Chong-hwa and Yi Sang-hwa therefore turned to dark imitations of the European decadent movement. However, in a poem like "Koryo Celadon" Pak uses an aesthetic theme as an indirect statement of national pride, which was later to be taken up in his novels.
During the Goryeo period of a thousand years before, the unique grey-green celadon ware had been the main type of ceramics produced on the Korean peninsula but under Japanese rule, artware pottery had all but disappeared from the country. In the past it had been particularly associated with Buddhist ceremonies, hence the bodhisattva reference in the first stanza. The poem then turns to later successors of ceong-ja, the so-called white celadon and cobalt-blue kingfisher shade mentioned in the second stanza, and in the third to the types of use to which the pottery was put.

Novels

Learning this approach through his poetry, Park Jonghwa devoted the rest of his life to writing historical novels that espouse Korean nationalism. The Literature Translation Institute of Korea summarizes this part of his career:
A last major work was King Sejong the Great serialised in Chosun Ilbo from 1969 to 1977 running to 2456 episodes, and later the basis for the TV series, Tears of the Dragon.

Works in Translation

  • ''King Sejong : a novel''

Works in Korean (Partial)

Novels

Awards