New from Tamal Vista

The Artistry of
Early
Korean Cartography

L ook at any modern map of the Korean-Chinese border; Mount Paekdu will most likely be marked with a small triangle and the summit’s altitude printed to the side. Turning to a map of the Chosŏn dynasty, however, this all-important peak with its sacred connotations will be rendered altogether differently. Much like a landscape painting, Paekdu’s rugged outline will seem to rise from the surface of the map. To early Korean cartographers, the land was a figure that moved and breathed, the locus of yin and yang and the field of operation for the five transformations (ohaeng). The maps they created thus rendered mountains and rivers as if they were human bones and veins. The lay of the land was seen as inseparable from the geomantic forces of creation and regeneration.

The Artistry of Early Korean Cartography is a window on the cultural, technological, and even spiritual factors that affected the way Koreans observed themselves, their landscape, and the rest of the world before the twentieth century. How did cartography stand astride the realms of art and science in pre-modern Korea? How do Koreans today understand the roots of their own culture, and what new perspective can their insights lend to our own views of the world? These questions and many others are taken up by three of Korea’s leading scholars, Han Young-woo, Ahn Hwi-Joon and Bae Woo Sung. Nearly one hundred color images of important cartographic works open up the “Hermit Kingdom” to reveal its perceptions of itself and the world around it.

By Dong-Choon Kim

Translated by Sung-ok Kim

ISBN: 978-0-917436-09-3
Price $24.00
Paper
321 pages
Trim Size: 6” x 9.3”
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008941380

M ore than half a century has passed since the sign​ing of the armistice that ended the fighting of the Korean War (1950-1953). However, the war rages on in Korean society: North and South continue to face off over the thirty-eighth parallel, families remain divided, and stories about what happened during the war still cannot be told.

Many histories of the war document its battles, explaining troop movements and military strategies. Others theorize about why the war started and who is to blame. In contrast, Dong-Choon Kim seeks to understand the true impact of the war on South Korea’s people and society. How did key figures such as President Syngman Rhee respond when North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and what does this tell us about the nature of the South Korean state at the time? How did South Koreans experience the North Korean occupation and what happened once Seoul and other areas were restored? Why were so many people brutally massacred by both sides? How does the war continue to influence South Korean institutions and society? This social history of the Korean War addresses these crucial questions, exposing and probing the war’s deepest wounds, wounds long concealed by Cold War rhetoric and successive oppressive military regimes in the South.

Also From Tamal Vista

what sound can penetrate the ear that has never heard the sick child's moan From "Small Song" in Traveler Maps

Traveler Maps
Poems by Ko Un

Translated by David R. McCann

ISBN 0-917436-06-7
Price: $25.95 $19.00
84 pages
Trim Size: 3"×4"
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003116298

One of present-day Korea's most revered and prolific writers, many followers of contemporary Korean literature believe Ko Un will be nominated for a Nobel Prize. Once a Buddhist monk, then a political dissident, and always a poet, Ko Un is "able to make the intensely personal into work having universal appeal and significance," writes David McCann, Harvard Professor of Korean Literature.

Translated into English by McCann, Ko Un's voice rings through the profound, intense, and often intensely funny poems in Traveler Maps. Long-time friends, McCann and Ko have been traveling together both literally and metaphorically for years. Having been to so many real and imagined places together, rather than "translating," Professor McCann often simply composes from his deep understanding of Ko Un and where he goes in his poetry. As a result, a reader gets an insightful representation of Ko Un's work as well as stunning English-language poetry.

Traveler Maps' design is based on a 17th-century book of maps used by Korean travelers - something put in their pockets to help find the way. Although the book is small, each of its sheets unfurls to present poems on large twelve-by-twelve inch pages. Traveler Maps is meant to unfold like the poems it contains, to be a collection of "maps" that guide a reader to some of the poetic places Ko Un visits. Hand-assembled and printed on 70 lb. felt text-stock, the book looks and feels like its 17th-century inspiration.

Benjamin Franklin Award winner, named Best Book of Poetry/ Literary Criticism 2005 by the Independent Book Publisher's Association.

Winner of the 2004-2005 Best Poetry Book, Northern California Publishers and Authors Association.