well, you sure can't trust meteorologists

Chung Min, a professor of Korean literature, writes in the JoongAng Daily about how weather and environment factor into literature.

Earlier this month, at the Third International Workshop for the Translation and Publication of Korean Literature hosted by the Korea Literature Translation Institute, I had a discussion with Ivana M. Gruberova, a Czech specialist in Korean studies. She had a copy of 'The Anthology of Korea's Chinese Poems' in Czech with her.
'If I had not seen the steep and rocky Korean mountains, the first spring flowers after a long winter and the blaze of fall tints,' Ms. Gruberova said, 'I might have thought Koreans were excessively attached to mountains and Korean poems too frequently contained images of flowers and tinted leaves. If I had not talked with Koreans, I might have thought the emotions depicted in the Korean poems were false.'

By happenstance the next day, I landed at Prague's airport on my way to a trip around Eastern Europe. What I saw after an 11-hour flight and a few more hours on a bus were endless golden fields in the low hills, pastures vanishing beyond the horizon and primitive forests stubbornly resisting being trodden by humans.

Passing by tens of thousands of or hundreds of thousands of wheat and corn fields where there were no paths, I kept recalling what my acquaintance had said the previous day.

I could understand her saying that by coming and seeing directly, she could understand why Korean poets clung to mountains so much and were so sensitive to the changes in season.

It's a nice piece. I'll try and manage a couple more posts today, but let's be Wednesday pessimists and guess I may not.

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