Korean Books at SOAS 2: North Korean poetry collections
Just a bit of eye-candy for book-lovers really. These are six poetry collections from North Korea dating from the late fifties to early sixties. I think the prints are really nice and very much of their time, although of course things haven’t moved on that much in the DPRK and you can pick up books from only a few years ago that have very similar covers.
One thing that is very noticeable about these books is that apart from the one in the top centre (건설의 나날) they all depict very rural or wild scenes and they have titles like ‘The Embrace of the Earth’ (대지의품). It is interesting and perhaps surprising to note that at a time of massive industrialisation the nostalgic/romantic fetishisation of nature seems to have been a major theme (ok so I haven’t actually read the poems, but there’s something to be said for judging a book by its cover). I say surprising because we tend to think of ‘communist’/state capitalist countries as fetishising industrialisation itself.
If you look closely at the two books to the bottom left you will see, however, that the pastoral scenes do include some form of farm machinery or tractors - clearly a hint at rural progress.
Wow. The images are intriguing. Your interpretation of these book covers as nostalgia for the rural past seems quite right, which also makes me wonder if perhaps these poems were written more by the elite class rather than peasants.
The orderly-plowed fields that stretch into the distance, as you rightly noted, seems like a sign of progress. Very Mao.
Comment by tak — July 21, 2005 @ 3:43 pm
My understanding of the literary class in North Korea at this point in time is that they were generally intellectuals of the Japanese colonial period. Many of these people had been left-leaning, and even some who weren’t that leftwing had ‘gone north’ before or during the Korean War. Anyway, they would have been fairly privileged people, often educated in Japanese universities I expect. I very much doubt that in any of these cases we’re talking about ‘proletarian poets’.
If you’re at all interested in the dicussion on the previous post, it’s all happening over at blogger. I haven’t done much about cutting the umbilical cord yet and seem to have committed myself to running two versions of my blog…
Comment by kotaji — July 22, 2005 @ 4:48 pm