Francisca Cho notes in the preface to her book that the power of longing lies at the intersection of religion and art. I can think of no other work in the Korean language that embodies this truth more than the collection of eighty-eight poems that is Nimmŭi ch'immuk. Written in the vernacular by the Buddhist monk, reformist, and independence movement activist Han Yongun (1879–1944), the 1926 collection captures the imagination of readers, who find in these poems something much more than the self-expression of someone in love. The concept of nim, often translated as “lover” or “love” but connoting deep longing, whose semantic largeness Cho captures in “everything yearned for,” lies at the heart of both Manhae's quest for personal freedom and his equal devotion to social change.
The significance of Manhae's poems, beyond the call of nationalist duty that ideological readings have imposed on them, lies in the...