2026 marks 100 years since Han Yong-un’s poetry collection The Silence of Love was first published in 1926. The poems were written at Baekdamsa in 1925 and issued by Hoedong Seogwan the following year. The volume contains 88 poems, including the title poem.
NowHitz Editorial · 2026-09-28 · From the archive
The title poem opens with separation from a beloved. Yet the collection does not remain inside loss. Its larger movement passes through sorrow and pain toward hope and the possibility of meeting again.
At the center is “nim,” a word that refuses a single referent. Literary sources note that it can be read as a beloved, the nation, truth or the Buddha. That openness allows love poetry, historical experience and Buddhist thought to occupy the same language.
A century later, that openness is what NowHitz returns to. Because the poem does not close itself around one answer, silence can read less like absence and more like a space in which meaning and relationship are rebuilt after loss.
When the lost beloved is not given only one name, silence keeps speaking.
