Brought to you by WITH S2 Written In The Heavens Subbing Squad
Please do NOT hardsub and/or stream this episode using our English subtitles.
EBS History of Culture Series - Part 1 THE COUNT OF MYEONGDONG
Narrated by JUNG Bo Seok
Starring PARK Cheol Ho
LEE Jin Woo
KIM Seong Ryeong
CHA Gwang Su
LEE Jae Eun; AHN Jung Hoon
KANG Tae Gi; PARK Young Ji
LEE Young Hu; KIM Ja Ok; CHOI Sang Hoon
HWANG Beom Shik; HEO Yoon Jung; YOO Jong Geun
Screenplay by JUNG Ha Yeon
Episode 2
You can find the hills of Montmartre in Paris, France.
It's the place where poor painters lived and found work.
New York City has its "Village."
This, too, is a place where poor artists made their living.
London has the West End, with many of the most famous theaters.
And, in Germany's Heidelberg, torrents of beer are flowing.
We can't help but envy those cultural symbols.
Ever basked in that hazy nostalgia, looking up Rome's Piazza di Spagna?
In flow is beauty.
Montmartre and the Village have both become famous tourist spots.
They're known as places where artists sang, danced and loved,
earning the spotlight in the tourism industry.
All those artists' birth houses, and the places they visited...
were carefully preserved.
But that is nothing we should envy...
because we have a similar place, too.
It was exactly here, Myeongdong.
If there's anything to regret,
it's that traces of its old appearance are mostly lost.
We couldn't preserve this place as much as they do abroad,
but right here in Myeongdong, human spirit was oozing from every corner.
You could even smell all the hope, after years of despair,
and all the flourishing arts,
from literature to every other cultural movement.
We had the Korean War during the 1950s.
And, on May 16, 1961, there was a coup d'etat.
During that decade,
Myeongdong wasn't just the mecca of Korean culture,
but it represented the unique sentiment and look of our country.
We'll start once again with poet Kim Su Young's story.
Is anyone there?
Because, without understanding what Kim Su Young went through,
we will never understand the Korea of the 1950s.
It's me, Park In Hwan!
I have good news!
I found something about Su Young!
Hyeon Kyung! Go change and come with me.
I brought my car, so let's go meet Su Young.
Is he alive?
Yes, he's at the Geoje Island P.O.W. (Prisoners of War) Camp.
What are you waiting for? Go get ready.
Su Young is alive! Aren't you happy?
I...
I'm sorry.
I can't go now.
You can't? Why?
I have my reasons...
Didn't you come down to Busan to look for him?
Why can't you go now?
What's going on?
Honey.
It's nothing.
Lee Jong Gu (Kim Su Young's friend)
Aren't you Park In Hwan?
It's me, Lee Jong Gu!
Geoje Island P.O.W. Camp
Kim Su Young (poet)
Aren't you Kim Su Young Seonsaengnim*? (*deferential address)
Who am I speaking to?
You remember Kim Eun Shil?
No Bong Shik
I know Eun Shil...
She said she was abused by commies so often,
she impulsively reacted that way and screamed at you.
She asked me to convey to you her apologies.
I'm hating myself more and more...
How could she feel any different?
You know Park In Hwan Seonsaengnim, right?
I've arranged a meeting with him, so follow me.
Come in.
Come on in, Sir.
Su Young!
You fool! You made it alive!
Have some!
What are you doing?
Would they feed you properly here?
I said, eat.
Su Young.
I'm not a commie, you bastard.
I said I'm not a commie!
Who said you are?
I'm just a person, you bastard.
I'm not a commie!
Think I wouldn't know? How could you be one?
A real poet would never become a commie.
Come on, have something to eat.
I'm not a commie!
I said I'm not...
How is the coffee?
It's very good.
Have one of these, too.
There's one hour left before roll call,
so have a nice talk together.
Miss No.
Yes?
Thank you.
I was a fan of you two.
I aspired to become a writer myself.
What on earth happened?
How did you end up as a Northern POW?
We'll briefly pause the story...
and go back to 1948.
Kim Su Young's mother had opened a tavern near the Central Police HQ.
This is the place where Korean poetry's modernism had started.
To our poetry!
To a new start for our contemporary poetry!
Hurrah!
I think this "New Poetry Essay" showed...
all the passion of those young poets like Park In Hwan.
Yoon Seok San - Professor of Korean Literature, Hanyang University
It encapsulated the kind of modernism they wanted to convey.
This new modernism polarized opinions.
Choi Ha Rim (poet; wrote Kim Su Young's biography)
To those who supported and were part of the movement,
who always strove for traditional sentiments,
it felt very much inappropriate,
and was considered as something devoid of Korean identity.
It was something they couldn't accept,
an illegitimate child laughing in the face of tradition.
But people like Kim Gi Rim,
or people familiar with the concept of freedom,
highly praised it.
Kim Byung Wook
More than 1930s' modernism,
it was something much more affirmative,
pushing the right issues at the right time.
But the reason this modernism couldn't last...
was the Korean war itself,
because they couldn't ingraft modernism in people's minds,
while surrounded by ruins.
That is why the shortness of our second wave of modernism went hand in hand...
with our particular history, and the reality of the time.
"O, my fellow youth!"
"Embrace your shivered ruins of hope."
"Once again step on that shadow of the future, far away."
"And let's together roar the axis into tears."
"The station where the storm rested was our starting point."
"Moved by newfound zest and vigor, the train starts again."
"That moment of violent shock."
"Like breaking the flowers' harmonious arrangement."
"Like my deserted destiny, the train leaves."
"Right as the flowers were about to bloom."
"You were in arms, jumping ropes."
"I pursued an effulgent form."
"But that, too, felt like an evil stratagem."
"Pasta, that which was called "Maccheroni" in Italian."
"Was that my rebelling spirit?"
"My friend, now look at me."
"Those inanimate objects and their appearance."
"Their depth and quantity."
"Their stupidity and sharp wits all together."
"Will now die, along with me."
It's difficult, too difficult.
Modernism doesn't mean your prose has to be so abstruse.
And what about your sentimentalism?
Kim Kyung Rin (poet)
Then, how about me?
Are you telling me I'm in the middle?
"All together will now die, along with me."
Just because you quoted Confucius,
you won't escape from sentimentalism.
Isn't living all sentimentalism?
It brings you to tears, that thing called life.
I've never lost my reason even for a short second.
You need to look at life in a dispassionate way,
not to beguile your own living.
So what are you, left or right?
Looking at life dispassionately doesn't belong to the left wing?
It's the point itself that's wrong.
Sentimentalism can't follow Oh Jang Hwan,
but Oh Jang Hwan followed Lee Tae Ju to the North.
"I was crying at the hospital, the night of August 15."
"You might think I was partaking in your same joy with my tears."
"But that was nothing but a lie."
What?
Dying in front of your mother was disgraceful and mortifying?
Whatever, that is rubbish!
I'm saying "we'll all die" is not sentimentalism.
Filling your prose with difficult terms,
"All together will now die, along with me."
That's rubbish as well, Su Young.
Right, rubbish.
Mine is rubbish as well!
Let's toast to that!
How can ideology be rubbish?
Byung Wook.
We're done talking, what's wrong with you?
What is the reason we wrote the "New Poetry Essay"?
Kim Byung Wook (poet)
Wasn't it a warning to all the fools who write lyrical poetry,
ignoring our generation's sorrow?
Literature ignoring the masses is not literature.
That is what you call rubbish.
I never meant that, when I said I look at reality in a dispassionate way.
I meant that at least poetry should be honest.
That is why any literature devoid of a generation's dominant ideology...
is nothing but rubbish.
Byung Wook, are you by any chance moving to the left?
The moment literature starts siding with the bourgeois,
it becomes a drug, one that makes you ignore the truth.
Fine! Fine!
We need a debate like this, to call it modernism!
So, in that sense, let's have another toast!
To rubbish!
That of driving a line between ideologies wasn't Kim Su Young's goal.
But, through the Korean War,
he learned that it was exactly that ideology...
that trampled on our lives, and became the force supporting them.
Becoming naturally involved with the political atmosphere of the time,
it was inevitable the literary world will follow along in the division.
So left circles formed the "Joseon Writers' Alliance,"
and right wing nationalists formed the "National Joseon Writers' Association."
Of course there was a rivalry between these two societies.
Jang Seok Ju
That is why, after the Liberation,
a conflict between left and right emerged in literary circles.
It was a really deep and serious confrontation.
It was from that point that left- leaning writers went back North,
until the beginning of the Korean War on June 25, 1950.
That was the time when that cultural confrontation moved to the battlefield.
Among those people,
after the South Korean government was established in 1948,
there were people who cut their ties with the left wing,
and supported the creation of a liberal democracy.
When the war began,
there were people who formed groups with other writers from the North.
But, after Seoul was won back by the South,
among those people some writers were condemned.
There were many happenings like that.
We'll now go back to Kim Su Young's story.
How did you become a POW?
Tell me!
How did you learn about me?
Jo Byung Hwa contacted me.
He said he received a postcard from you,
and that it came from the Geoje Island POW Camp.
Po...postcard?
You don't remember?
You're telling me...
I sent Jo Byung Hwa a postcard?
July 1950
We'll have to run away.
There's a rumor they're bringing all the writers up North.
But, I wrote they were going to Anseong?
Anseong?!
Yesterday, at the gathering,
they were writing about the formation of a new cultural circle.
So, following Im Hwa's advice, I was thinking of writing Nakdong River.
But your hometown is Anseong, so I wrote that instead.
It's a lie.
They're using that as an excuse, to then forcibly enlist them as Volunteer Corps,
and bring them to the North.
Who said that?
Oh Jang Hwan revealed it to me.
And you trust him?
Look, Su Young. Don't badmouth Oh Jang Hwan that way.
Think he's really a commie, deep down?
Whatever he projects on the outside,
deep down you can feel how sorry he feels.
I don't trust him.
Su Young!
Don't go to the gathering tomorrow.
Uh?
Comrades! Just like the brave spirit those volunteer corps have shown,
you should take that as an example, and join the corps yourself!
The works you're writing now...
can be achieved any time,
after we've completely eradicated those American imperialists'...
presence from this land, and when the peninsula is liberated.
But, now!
Yu Jeong; Park Gye Ju (both poets)
I don't like the sound of this.
A cultural circle turning into volunteer corps.
Even the destination changed to the North.
We'll have to find the right time, and run away.
I think the same.
How about you?
Su Young!
Would they force scribes to hold guns?
Hey.
He's gone.
Why are you so scared?
I'll have to run away.
Get moving!
I envy Park Gye Ju.
He must be sleeping at home by now.
Why didn't you follow him?
How can I leave a friend here and run away?
At least you run away, Su Young.
Isn't Hyeon Kyung pregnant?
That's why I can't.
What if they capture her instead?
I guess... that's the same reason I couldn't.
These fools could retaliate any day.
What's going on, in such a hurry?
I'll have to go back.
You just ran away. Where would you be heading to?
It would be okay if I could just run away by myself,
but then, they'll retaliate against our entire family.
Why did you come back?
Oh... thinking about it,
I was worried they'd hurt my family instead.
Still... you come back?!
Ah... really.
Here! Here!
Let's get moving.
We need to reach the station before dawn.
Come on, let's get up, Comrades!
Let's hurry up.
Why didn't you run away?
You said surveillance was miserable.
What scared us wasn't their surveillance.
It was fear.
What if they caught us after running away?
How cruel a retaliation would they unleash on us?
And... our families...
So, how far did they bring you?
Just tell me! How did you become a POW?
Didn't you hear anything about my mother?
I sent her a postcard, but still no reply.
Find my mother for me.
I'm afraid she went into refuge after the January 4 retreat*.
*South Korean and UN forces retreating after Chinese intervention
Since she's not in Seoul, the reply will never come, right?
And...
find how Hyeon Kyung is doing, too.
She must have given birth already.
Given birth?
The kid must have passed his first birthday already.
Could it be a girl, or a boy?
Okay.
I'll look into it.
They must be alive, right?
Of course!
Tell me about you, instead.
Later.
That... Let's talk about it later.
He asked about you as well.
He kept asking if it was a boy or a girl.
I couldn't tell him anything.
I'm sorry.
How could you do this?
Kim Hyeon Kyung (Kim Su Young's wife)
I'm sorry.
He was captured by the People's Army,
and barely made it alive.
I couldn't tell him what you did.
Park Hyung, I'll tell him.
I don't want to hear anything from you!
The moment they reclaimed Seoul,
Hyeon Kyung came looking for me in Busan.
She heard the rumor that Su Young had fled from the Volunteer Corps.
She thought he'd be in Busan, so came looking for him.
I've spent all that time looking for him all over the place.
I don't want to hear such trivial excuses from you!
You were the one who introduced Hyeon Kyung to Su Young.
But... how could you...
I'd heard rumors Su Young was dead.
So...
He's alive, Su Young.
It's all my fault.
Trying to console Hyeon Kyung, I just...
crossed a line I should have never gotten close to.
There is no excuse.
What are you going to do?
I said, what are you going to do?!
War is the most amoral of situations.
How should I put it? Men wearing a beast's mask?
Everything is possible, in a time of war.
So, even Kim Su Young's unbelievable fate,
if filtered through the vestiges of war,
becomes something quite ordinary.
In a time of war, even death is a normal event,
nothing but ordinary pain.
But people, experiencing something as extreme as war,
develop an even stronger attachment to life.
It's in Seoul's Myeongdong, changed into a rubble-filled wasteland,
where we shall talk about that.
This is not too bad.
Ajumma!
Why are you touching someone else's things?!
Why is this yours?
I went as far as Ojang-Dong to get all these.
What on earth are you talking about?!
I bought these myself!
Bought these, my ass!
Look here.
I wrote everything in detail.
You despicable little thief.
Let go!
So you're going to lay your hands on me?
- Think I wouldn't? - Honey! Hurry up and come here!
This man is going to hit me!
What's wrong?
He was stealing our boards and trying to hit me with them!
Oh my! Listen!
When did I ever try to do that?
You people, you saw him, right?
Okay, okay. Let's stop.
What's all this fuss for just one board?
"Just one board"?
We need these to shelter ourselves from the weather.
I said I got it. Just let go.
How can you act like that? Always so weak.
Ohh... I'm sorry.
You can use all these yourself.
Ah! Such benevolence!
Damn it... ehhh!
Hey!
How can you act like this is yours, you thieving bastard?!
What?!
Thieving bastard?!
I ought to...
Calm down!
There's no need to fight over this!
Ehhh... I really ought to!
- Did you have a fight? - Fight what?
Keep an eye on your wife!
She's a bit intense, isn't she?
After all, if it weren't for that intensity,
we wouldn't have survived.
Ehhh... the hell...
Lee Seonsaengnim!
- You're here! - Have you brought me some dollars?
These days dollars are the rage.
You can make ten times what you invest.
If I find any, I'll let you know.
You need to sell them to me.
Don't worry.
Right!
Did you find your kids?
Not yet.
We still don't know whether they could make it or not.
You'll find them for sure.
Don't worry about it.
Yes.
So...
Mister Hong.
What money could he have,
to always have to listen to your dollar symphony?
You've got to be kidding me.
Those people always have dollars stashed somewhere, as emergency funds.
You need dollars to run to Japan or somewhere else.
Lee Seonsaengnim is not the type!
He was the first to return after the Chinese troops retreated!
The moment the war started, the first to run away...
were rich scumbags and eggheads, you fool!
It was poor people like us, who were struggling alone in Seoul.
Just stop talking like that.
People with knowledge should be respected,
if you want to turn this into a decent country.
The hell with that. Does knowledge feed you?
So, if you're staring, what?!
Still, intelligent people are easier to deal with.
Isn't that right, Mister Choi?
Just wait. Things will get messy once again,
and then you'll need dollars to survive!
Get messy once again?!
He's just talking nonsense.
Ahh... think about it!
Why would the president stay in Busan, then?
He would be here already.
I said, just wait.
Something will happen soon.
Very soon!
Mona Lisa
You're open?
Yes, please come in.
Mona Lisa.
You like the name?
Yes. I always miss the coffee from Myeongdong,
I got lucky this time.
Oh... can I have a cup of coffee?
Not today.
You'll have to wait until tomorrow.
That's okay. Just give me anything.
It's still all in disorder.
Since I just opened today.
I'm sorry.
But, by the way,
I don't see the Mona Lisa.
If the name of the coffee shop is Mona Lisa,
shouldn't you at least have a photo of her on the wall?
I don't know what Mona Lisa is myself.
You're telling me you don't know who the Mona Lisa is?
Mona Lisa's smile, never heard of it?
I'm sorry. I thought it was just a famous street from abroad.
What now?
It's okay, no problem.
I'll find you the Mona Lisa.
Is Mona Lisa that famous?
Of course she is.
Wait.
Looking at you,
it does resemble you, Madam!
Me?
Yes, exactly that smile!
The once empty and lonesome Myeongdong...
saw one coffee shop after another open their doors.
Stand bars started to appear as well.
The scent of coffee and drinks, stimulating your sense of smell.
All you needed to start the nightlife in the city was music.
Edith Piaf's "Hymne a L'Amour"
Are you opening?
I still don't know yet.
Dancers and stage actors keep asking me when I'll open,
so I'll have to start sweeping, at least.
We need the Arts Theater open, so that Myeongdong will start bustling.
I totally agree.
- Have a nice day. - Yes, yes.
Applause Coffee Shop
My apologies for last time.
You paid for my drinks, I should be the one apologizing.
It was my pleasure.
What is your name, if I may ask?
I'm Lee Hwa Ryong.
Lee... Hwa Ryong.
I'll see you around.
Ah!
Thank you for the drinks.
If you need any more credit there, let me know.
I'll pay them some more.
Ahhh! No.
There's still over 5,000 won left.
I don't know what you do for a living,
but I'm really thankful.
My pleasure.
Yes, thank you. Have a nice day.
How's the coffee?
It's good!
Our chef worked at the Bando Hotel.
This is the only place where you can drink coffee from the pot.
Coffee pot?
Don't you know there was also coffee boiled in pots?
During the 50s, coffee was boiled in coffee pots.
This was an old art, of finding the right water temperature...
and the amount of coffee to use, judging with one's eyes alone.
The chefs without the ability to do that,
would just add boiling water to the coffee beans.
The taste and scent were much worse than when prepared in coffee pots.
Tell me, Lee Seonsaengnim.
Do you know that person well?
Who?
The one you talked to, near the entrance.
It's just an acquaintance, I guess.
Why?
Can you introduce me to him?
So business will pick up a little.
Why, what does he do for a living?
He's a gangster, don't you know?
Gangster?!
How the hell are you dressed?
What did I tell you?
If you have enough money to have a feast,
get yourself some decent clothes first!
Intellectuals can wear whatever they want,
but if ignorant fools like you dress that way,
it's no different from going around...
with "I'm a hoodlum" written on your forehead.
Get the boys to the tailor and dress them properly.
But... th...that's so expensive.
Buy them a hat as well.
Why, will we earn respect if dressed like that?
Such a waste of money, decent clothes! Eh...
Follow me.
Lee Hwa Ryong.
The boss of the so called "Myeongdong Gang."
One of the bigwigs of the gang world,
who would have a bitter rivalry with Dongdaemun's Lee Jung Jae.
But Lee Hwa Ryong was a gentleman,
who never used his fist even once.
Stand properly, you fools.
Walk like a slouch wearing these clothes,
and you'll look like a pathetic country bumpkin.
Did you buy the hat as an ornament, you prick?
Follow me.
Be it a market or a shopping district like Myeongdong,
wherever money was to be made, you'd find gangs.
Before liberation, they were called "fist" or "shoulder" in slang.
But right after, the moniker "gangster" started emerging.
People say the Korean "Ggangpae" (Gangster)...
came from the English "Gang,"
but it could be just something they made up.
We'll have to go back to Kim Su Young's story now.
Geoje Island POW Camp
Come on, eat.
Would they feed you well in there?
What was it?
A boy or a girl?
It's a boy.
Really?
I would have been happy even with a daughter.
Just eat, come on.
I boiled some chicken as well, so eat.
How is she doing?
She went to Busan looking for you,
so she must have found work there.
I said, eat.
They're treating me well here, Mother.
What?!
The US Army officer asked around who could speak English,
so, when I raised my hand, he said to say all the English I knew.
So I just started reciting one of Elliot's poems,
and the guy started getting all red.
Why are you crying again, Mother?
I told you to come here and see I was doing well.
I've heard the anti-Communists...
and the People's Army POW fight all the time.
Also, that many people are dying here.
I'm just fine, since I speak some English.
You don't know what could happen to you.
Mother.
I might be released soon, Mother.
When the truth about me not being part of the People's Army is revealed.
Really?
I ran away after they brought me up North,
and went home to meet you.
You did?
Yes.
But I was captured near the Central Police HQ,
and those fools just beat up people for no reason.
You bastard!
Look at this cold-blooded fool!
Even if he's bleeding, he's not screaming even once.
You bastard. Where did you run away from?
As they were bringing me up North...
Don't lie to me, you scumbag!
You came back here to spy on us, didn't you?!
I'm a poet.
I was captured by the People's Army...
People's Army? They're just puppets!
Look at this bastard.
He doesn't complain even once.
This is a commie for real, all right.
You bastard!
You should have told them you weren't.
Just tell them they captured you when the war started.
I told them, Mother.
That I wasn't from the People's Army.
That I was a poet.
That I just write poems,
but I was captured, and then ran away.
That I missed my family so much, I was going back home.
During the war,
a POW camp was established on Geoje Island, Gyeongsang Province.
According to records,
at the time about 111,000 people lived on Geoje Island.
Then, about 100,000 people from North or South who fled the war.
Then another 132,000 POW...
were with the 8th US Battalion's second supply base in Geoje Island.
Leading operations was the US Forces' commander,
and all positions of high responsibility...
were given to US officers.
All that the Korean soldiers took care of was guarding the camp.
But the biggest problems were in the POW ranks.
Along with Communist sympathizers,
people like Kim Su Young, so called "anti-Communists" who were...
forcibly taken to the North and then imprisoned,
were treated just like People's Army POWs.
Sparks between the two groups constantly ignited.
The practice of killing each other became common.
But the anti-Communists were inferior in number.
Terrible accidents, like pro-Communist forces attacking anti-Communists,
making them face popular trials and then killing them, kept happening.
Kim Su Young's story is getting longwinded.
But...
without explaining this succession of events Kim went through,
we wouldn't be able to understand 1950s Korean society.
It wasn't just a matter of living a murky life, like Kim Su Young,
nor the grim realities of war.
What we want to know, is how the spirit of a poet...
could be torn to pieces like that,
and the world view emerging from those torn pieces...
which built up his prose.
"The words of a poet, who envied the soaring movement...
of the skylarks piercing the blue sky, should be changed."
"Anyone who struggles for freedom and endured that brutality will know."
"What does the skylark sing about?"
"Why does freedom's scent smell of blood?"
"Why is this revolution so lonesome?"
"Why should it mean loneliness at all?!"
Such were Kim Su Young's words.
Jang Yong Hak's collection of poems were about...
the Geoje POW Camp as well.
In it, you can find the story of a poet called Nue,
who committed suicide throwing himself at the barbed wire,
and was punished by pro-Communist POWs,
forcing him to wait for the sun to set from the East Sea,
while carrying his eyes in his hands.
The pro-Communists picked Nue's eyes out.
And then they started singing.
"Mulberry, mulberry, its leaves are falling."
Kim Su Young experienced even worse things than that Nue,
whose eyes were picked out by pro-Communist POWs at Geoje Island.
What he experienced were people turning into beasts,
moved by that illusion called ideology.
He saw corpses hacked to pieces, lying lifeless in the lavatory.
How despicable can people become?
How much more cruel does this world need to become...
to overcome the Great Wall of ideology?
It's from the torn spirit of a poet...
that our 1950s had started.
Who?!
Did you say Park In Hwan?
Yes.
Where is he now?
He went to that bar you usually frequent,
and said that if you wouldn't be there, he'd wait for you.
Thank you so much, Madam Shin.
I told you, you bring me luck!
Oh... Look who's there.
Isn't that Lee Bong Gu?
Oh! Gongcho Seonsaengnim!
When did you come?
- Have any cigarette? - Yes.
Here you go, Seonsaengnim.
You give me the whole thing?
Where are you hanging out, these days?
Oh Sang Soon (poet)
Right next to the park,
you'll find the "Bronze Coffee Shop."
Come there.
I'm there every day.
Understood, Seonsaengnim.
I'll come visit you often.
You can go. You looked busy.
Right!
Oh! Care for a drink?
I quit drinking.
What?! Why?
Go. Uh?
Yes.
If you say "Gongcho" Oh Sang Soon,
cigarettes will instantly come to mind.
But his literary world was not well known to everyday people.
Many people know him as a poet who smoked all his life.
But you'll find very few people with his kind of honor and integrity.
He spent his life avoiding the pomp and circumstance of mundanity.
Could we perhaps call him our time's last scholar?
Baudelaire's "La Destruction"
"Sometimes, knowing my deep love for Art, he assumes..."
"The form of a most seductive woman."
"And, with pretexts specious and hypocritical..."
"Accustoms my lips to infamous philtres."
"He leads me thus, far from the sight of God."
"Panting and broken with fatigue, into the midst..."
"Of the plains of Ennui, endless and deserted."
"And thrusts before my eyes full of bewilderment..."
"Dirty filthy garments and open, gaping wounds."
"And..."
"All the bloody instruments of Destruction!"
Compared to Baudelaire's rapacity,
Camus shows a... How should I put it? Logical hollowness?
Listen.
"From where does the wind blow..."
"And where is it headed?"
"The wind is blowing..."
"What is the cause of my heart's anguish?"
"Another Hometown" by Yoon Dong Joo
"The night I returned to my hometown..."
"My skeleton followed me, lodging in the next room."
"Those dark rooms, connected only by a pillar."
"As if it came from heaven, the wind blows."
"Looking at it, beautifully weathering in darkness."
"Are these tears coming from me?"
"Is it my skeleton, or my beautiful spirit shedding those tears?"
How about Yoon Dong Joo?
I knew I'd find you, if I came here in Myeongdong.
Who would protect this place, if it's not me? Uh?
You man!
Here.
Baudelaire's "Allegory"
"She's a beautiful woman with opulent shoulders."
"Who lets her long hair trail in her goblet of wine."
"The claws of love, the poisons of brothels."
"All slip and all are blunted on her granite skin."
"She laughs at Death and snaps her fingers at Debauch."
"The hands of those monsters, ever cutting and scraping."
"Have respected nonetheless the pristine majesty..."
"Of her firm, straight body at its destructive games."
"She walks like a goddess, rests like a sultana."
Even if it had none of Baudelaire's rapacity,
nor any of Yoon Dong Joo's deep sadness and loneliness,
Myeongdong was slowly regaining its old splendor.
In the next episode, after Park In Hwan,
Kim Su Young is coming back to Myeongdong.
Brought to you by WITH S2 Written In The Heavens Subbing Squad
Main Translator/Timer: MisterX
Timing QC: Victory
Editor/QC: thunderbolt
Coordinators: mily2, ay_link
Congratulations, Kim Seonsaengnim!
I've heard they're releasing you.
Kim Su Young is back.
What? Really?!
I can't follow you now.
I'm sorry.
I told him to look at me, screaming...
and he asked me what was the point of seeing a commie like him.
Life... Is living that hard?
Just...
it's lonely. Living.
Why didn't I know that?
Poetry is like singing about life.
I'm a citizen of this country.
I missed the warm embrace of freedom, and fled the Volunteer Corps.
I'm Kim Su Young!
Because I missed the embrace of freedom!
The embrace of freedom!
Please do NOT hardsub and/or stream this episode using our English subtitles.
This is a FREE fansub. NOT for SALE!!! Get it for FREE @ d-addicts.com