When I picked up Dawn of Labor, I knew nothing of Park Nohae. In that way, I was the same as the collection’s original readers, back when Park’s poetry was first published under a pen name in Korea in 1984. Now forty years later, this seminal work is available to English readers in a new translation from Brother Anthony of Taizé and Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Transcending oceans, languages, cultures, and four decades of distance, Park’s words still echo today as strong as ever. 

     These words speak of labor, and of the harsh conditions factory workers found in Korea during the 1980s. It’s hard not to be moved by the thought of Park, the quintessential worker-poet known as “the faceless poet,” writing these words in pencil on tissue paper between long hours doing factory work. What urgency must he have felt! I think too of the zeal with which the readers met his work, his fellow workers, his countrymen, who considered these poems so essential to their understanding of their own struggle that they turned them into songs that spread across the country. Others had written of life inside the factory before, but Park’s writing was different—he was one of them. 

     Growing up in Beolgyo, a small farming village in the southern part of Korea, he went to Seoul to seek a better life, but was met with the brutal conditions of factory labor. He wrote of the grease that coated the machines the workers used, which in turn seeped into their lives, into their beings. He often described the bodies of his fellow workers as bruised, broken, and maimed despite their young ages. He wrote of lives lost to the implements of their labor, severed hands buried at the base of the factory walls after the workers couldn’t bear to give them to the victims’ families, in a way where you feel the sorrow of the workers as much as the physical pain of the victim.

     These poems are visceral, but their true strength lies in Park’s grasp of the emotions of the workers as much as in his understanding of the severity of their working conditions. In “No Way to Stop,” he writes:

     I run with all my strength,

     but the farther I go, the more distant I am

     Workers are a “spinning top,” clothes are “wrung ever drier.” In this constant churn, “Gone are my eyes’ shine, my smile, and my thoughts.” Yet the true cruelty is the endlessness of this struggle. He notes that “more frightening than any whip / is the fact that I must live.” I have never seen a factory floor, but I too have felt like my labor had no value, like no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t get ahead. In my moments of deepest despair, this is what grips me: what else is there to do but live?

     There must be more to life than endless labor. I’m sure it was this yearning that led Korean workers to rally around Park’s writing. The depth of Park’s empathy extends beyond just his brothers in labor and towards his sisters as well. In “Record of My Journey with Men,” Park writes from the perspective of a woman tracing back not only her relationships, but her journey from sida (a factory apprentice) to team leader. It is in this poem we start to see Park’s greatest gift: not only portraying the crushing factory conditions or the sacrifices the workers were forced to make but gesturing towards something better, something like hope:

     the company grew big,

     from a hundred workers to fifteen hundred,

     but all I have left are a rented room with a deposit worth half a million won,

     a cassette player purchased with monthly installments,

     and a worn-out twenty-five-year-old body.

     As the demands made upon them increase, the workers rally, convincing the narrator “that if we unite, we can win,” and it’s in this space, linked arm and arm with her brothers and sisters, “eyes moist with tears,” that her “heart becomes a peaceful land for the very first time.” In this peace, she realizes that she can go on, that life holds something more, and she finally feels love begin to bloom.

     I don’t share the exact concerns of Park’s narrators, but I too have worried about wages, about where I am going. But even beyond the galvanizing energy in these poems of liberation, there’s a depth and tenderness I didn’t expect. Rather than feel something coldly dogmatic that you might see in a pamphlet advocating for workers’ liberation, Park’s poetry sings. In this new edition, the poems are printed in both English translation and the original Korean so bilingual readers can appreciate them further. Brother Anthony and Kim have to be commended on their translation, portraying the subtlety and nuance of Park’s words so they continue to resonate all these years later. Park’s writing is beautiful, full of images I know I’ll carry with me. In a poem called “Spring,” he writes how “the yearning memory of her hometown quivers / like the waves of rising heat.” This longing, this homesickness is warm, but also fragile; a mirage, as likely to break as it is to come true. Yet the faces of her siblings “are clear as azalea petals.” It’s in holding these images we too know we can keep going, that things will change. 

     We are invited to consider the lives and working conditions of the laborers of Park’s day, but it’s the beauty of his rendering and this possibility for hope that etches this struggle into my heart, just as much as his depictions of pain, suffering, and loss. But this is only the first step, Park tells us, as the collection’s title poem suggests. The “dawn” Park anticipated shows us there is much work to be done, a new kind of labor, a work towards revolution, progress, and equity in both work and society. Park doesn’t simply describe the issues, but points towards a new day, a new future, one decided and built by us, rather than on others’ demands. Unfortunately, it’s a call that continues to be relevant, but luckily still resonates. But now, all these years later, we can see that what Park fought for has come to pass. It’s happened before, and it will happen again: 

     Right through the middle of uncertainty,

     resolutely, resolutely,

     we shall advance.

— From “For a Peaceful Evening”

Ian J. Battaglia

Writer, Literary Critic