the mountains stretch the soles of my shoes until they no longer fit me on level ground

Sweet Morning Choco Cream, hello. (clementines, hello!)

Autumn Coming

This summer
I shielded myself from the heat
with a thin hempen weave,
and now as autumn at last draws near
sunlight a thousand li away
touches my body just gently;

and having rinsed my mouth
this summer
with garlic wine,
as autumn draws near
the winds above my head flow clear.

The bi-lingual copy of Pak Chaesam's Enough to Say It's Far that I ordered online arrived today. English and Korean bi-lingual books of poetry are hard to find, even in Korea. I can't really do much with the Korean yet, but I'm glad it's there. I would have liked to write it out for you, but I can't reproduce the hanja (the Korean word for kanji/Chinese characters) on my computer. I don't have the tools.

What I can do with the original Korean is this:

I'm not really sure how they decided on line breaks in the English translation. In the Korean, the first lines of both stanzas are "This summer," and the third lines are "as autumn comes/approaches" (maybe, approximately, I don't really know very much about this). And everything in between is contained in one line, no breaks.

Maybe something like this:

This summer
I shielded myself from the heat with a thin hempen weave,
and as autumn comes
sunlight a thousand li away touches my body just gently;

this summer
I rinsed my mouth with garlic wine,
and as autumn comes
the winds above my head flow clear.

I can also tell you that the semi-colon that divides the poem in half is entirely accurate; the last syllable of the first stanza is 고 (ko/go), which is used to abridge the final verb of the first part of the sentence and lead into the second part of the sentence.

My final year at U-M with all you beautiful people was the first time, I think, that I've really come to love and value how poetry sounds. Before then, I'd never really gotten into read-arounds; reading things aloud was something I did alone in my room in a soft voice so that my neighbors couldn't hear me.

Now, after having gotten used to our read-arounds for such a short period of time, I miss them here. Can we skype and do nothing but read poems to each other?

Seriously?

oh. hello, home.

The foreign used bookstore in the international district, Itaewon.

How I am going to cook for myself and make vegetarian versions of Korean food.

Soon, I will know something about Korean literature.

So Chongju in translation, poems about his life during the Japanese occupation.

How I am going to teach myself Korean.

Because there are four owls and the words "THEN SHE CAME" in this book. Incidentally, the children's books were right next to / mixed in with the romance novels.

Interior of Noksapyeong Subway Station, one of the stops for Itaewon and the biggest subway station I've ever seen.

The only way this could be better is if it was "Thunder Chicken" instead (@bird_esque).