more from 이연주 (I Yun-Joo/Yi Yeon-Ju/Lee Yeon-Joo...):

독재자

내 일기책은 두 권 -- 반항과 복종
열린 마음인 양 한 권은 사무실 책상 위에
숨통에 꾸려 감춘 다른 한 권에서는
도둑질 같은 땀이 귄다

반항과 복종이라는 두 명이
나는 어른이 되었네
이스트를 넣어 부풀린 삶 속에서
밀 덩어리를 반족하듯 -- 일기책

반항적 남성은 복종이 기쁨인 여성을 지배한다
흐르는 강물과 사계절은
지하실 남골당의 뚜껑 깨진 푸른 단지

두 갈래 습관의 혓바닥이 쓰네
노동의 참신한 내 하루
도둑질 같은 땀을 훔치며
도망치는 보상없는 내 하루

두 명의 나를 길러 끌고가는 나는
집단심리를 제대로 쓰는 재벌 아닌가?
어느새 나는 민중이라는, 내,
독재자가 되어 있다.


The Dictator

My diary is in two parts -- resistance and obedience.
One is an open heart on top of my office desk
and the other is shoved inside a throat,
a cold sweat gathers inside.

Now I'm a grown-up
with a yeast-bloated existence
as if working dough.
The diary of two things -- resistance and obedience.

A dominant male subdues a female
who finds happiness in obedience.
A flowing river and the four seasons
are a blue jar with a broken lid in a crypt.

The tongue of divided habit tastes bitter.
My new day of labor, a day of loss,
running away in a cold sweat.

I drag along the two of me I've raised.
Could I be the corporate class
proficient in manipulating group psychology?
Already I've become the populace,
the dictator of myself.

They fucked up the second stanza real bad, this time. This is a word for word translation:

resistance and obedience the two beings'
now I'm a grown-up
a yeast-bloated existence
as if working dough -- diary

I'm pretty sure that diary is meant to be read as a possession of the two beings. I have no idea what the clearest/best way to translate this is, but I don't like the way they switched around the word(s) following the hyphen in the English translation.

"Crypt" in the third stanza is also inaccurate; "underground room" or "basement" is more likely.

There are probably loads of things I don't understand about the original poem and how it was translated, but I like it, especially the line "I drag along the two of me I've raised." And I relate to the resistance/obedience conflict, I think.

The new secretary at my school found me in the subway on Friday, and we sat next to each other on the blue line going north for a while. She's a kind woman who has never been anything but sweet to me, and I didn't mind her company at all until she asked me what church I go to.

It's not so unusual here, the assumption that because I am American, I am also Christian. I am always carefully polite when I say I have no religion, far more polite than I would be in Michigan if someone made the same assumption about me. Should I feel the need to be this polite? The people who ask me these things have, after all, made a somewhat racist assumption about me, somewhere along the lines of: "she's white! she speaks English! she must believe in God!"

But Christian missionaries from the U.S. are a strong presence in Korea, and may have been an even stronger presence in the past. Maybe the association of American<-->Christian is not so unreasonable.

I feel as though the religious pressure on me is increasing these days. It wasn't so long ago that Park Mi-Ran wanted to introduce me to a famous singer who attends her church, wanted me to come to church with her. She knows I'm not a Christian, and I told her that I would probably feel uncomfortable going to her church because of this. She accepted my feelings, and told me to think about it. She told me that I am young, and I don't know what may happen to me or what I may believe in in the future.

Park Mi-Ran is a reasonable woman; she's not going to put undue pressure on me to do something she knows I am uncomfortable with. She's essentially just left the door open for me; she's not going to pressure me, but if I wanted to, she would be happy for me to bring the subject up again.

I won't bring the subject up again, but neither am I angry over this interaction with Mi-Ran. It's true that I don't know what will happen in my future. Having been a Christian as a child and having long since decided that God is not something I believe in, I doubt that Christianity is in my future - but I won't deny that it is a possibility. Mi-Ran was not disrespectful of me, I was not disrespectful of her, and we are going together to eat (Korean-version?) Argentinian food and watch a tango show this Tuesday.

My reaction to the kind-hearted and well-meaning secretary lady was just as polite, but I seethed for hours afterwards, maybe I'm still seething. After I told her I had no religion she proceeded to tell me that she wants me to believe in God, and that she thinks in 10 years I will be a Christian. I was never so happy to get off the subway.

It's acceptable for elders to interfere in the lives of younger people in Korea, I keep telling myself. It's acceptable for them to give un-asked for advice in all kinds of situations. I am a young person; she is my elder. It doesn't mean I have to follow her advice, but it does mean I should accept her input without anger.

But it makes me so angry. I have been working hard this whole time to accept the people who are in my life in Seoul, and to understand where they are coming from without judgment. It makes me (unjustly, I know) angry that they do not always return me the same favor.

Anyway, resistance vs. obedience. Most of the time I contain my resisting impulses and choose obedience - and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

**update: in retrospect, "rebellion" seems to be a more accurate translation of "반항" than "resistance".

Say good-bye to dirty
unhygienic finger nails Please
pardon the dirty chronically
dirty nails

dirty dirty dirty There's a
cicada on my dirty nails

Those are not my dirty nails.

those damn dirty
lions Please
pardon the dirty nails.

I am just a dirty boy.

Mother, I can not give birth, he uleusyeotda milk. Thy breath, gained a good man like his mother, breaking my back against one another also said saleura. The doors of the pub at the docks or in the nails grow maebaltop naegeolrin humble town beside the lamp has been flowing into. The dead lice glued eyes in my sleep like my mother, bitch, until the morning feeling woosinda sobbing. Cool pittol my heart, rotten sound of flowing water. I live out in the depths of nails dig deeper into the grave. Wohae chireugi a life if you have a share of the armed stand in front of the stone throwing to live life the shares ... Kkeumulgeorinda jeondeungbul seemed dim off.

anxiety of words

When I got back to Seoul 2 weeks ago, this book


was waiting for me, and what a relief. Contemporary, and not just contemporary, but written by three anxious women who make me feel as though I'm being slapped in the face the way Alice Notley makes me feel as though I'm being torn apart. There's violence in their words, and it's a welcome change to the other volumes of largely nature-centric bilingual Korean/English poetry that I've managed to get my hands on.

This is 이연주.

매음녀 6

어머니, 날 낳으시고 젖이 없어 울으셨다.
어머니 숨 거두시며
마음 착한 남자, 등짝 맞대 살으라 이르셨다.
나는 부둣가에서
선술집 문짝에 내걸린 초라한 등불 곁에서
매발톱 손톱을 키워 도회지로 흘러왔다.
눈 붙이면 꿈속에서 어머니
이 버러지 같은 년아,
아침까지 흑흑 느껴 우신다.
내 심장 차가운 핏톨, 썩은 물 흐르는 소리.
나는 살 속 깊은 데서 손톱을 꺼내
무덤을 더 깊이 판다.
하나의 몫을 치르기 워해 삶이 있다면
맨몸으로 던지는 돌 앞에 서서 사는
이 몫의 삶은 ...
희미한 전등불 꺼질 듯 끄물거린다.


Prostitute 6

Mother cried after giving birth to me because she had no milk.
Mother told me with her last breath,
"Find a kind man and live happily ever after."
At a pier next to a dented lamp hung from a tavern door
I grew my thorny toenails, fingernails
and drifted to a city.
When I close my eyes
Mother weeps in my dream until morning, "You wormy bitch."
My heart, a cold bloody speck,
the sound of putrid running water.
I take out the fingernails from deep inside my flesh
and dig the grave deeper.
If life exists to pay off a single life
then this life
lived naked in front of the rocks thrown at you is ...
The dim light flickers as if it's about to go out.

I like this translator (Don Mee Choi) a lot better than Brother Anthony of Taize, who seems to dominate all the bilingual Korean/English poetry available. But I'm still really confused by a lot of the line break decisions she makes. I really need to learn Korean better, so that I can understand what the original poems are doing better, and make more judgments about the translations.

이시영 (I Shi-Young) 1949 -

정적

반포대교를 건너면 그곳은 나타난다
아침마다 헬기가 내리고 뜨는
거대한 그린 필드
서남으론 삼각지에서 서빙고역,
동남으론 이태원에서 한남동,
북으론 남산 아래턱 남영동 후암동까지.
옛날엔 이 땅이 조선군 사령부였지
버스를 타고 가다 부면
수지 미용실, 크라운 골프샾, 킴스 드라이크리닝 건너편으로
숨죽인 듯 그저 고요한 막사들
1900년대엔 흰옷 입은 농 꾼들이
곡괜이를 을러메고 와
내 땅 내놓아라 소리치다 피 흘리던 곳
그때의 감나무도 땀 배인 호박 구덩이도
해방의 길을 단숨에 달려온 지까다비도
철조망 안에서 썩고 있는데
오늘은 자작나무 희 숲 아래로
유우에스 아미 용산 메인 포스트의
번쩍이는 선명한 금빛 마크, 햇빛 아래
굳게 닫힌 푸른색 문
그렇다 친구여, 오늘의 발자국은 소리가 없다
혈맹도, 미소짓는 흰 이빨의 굳은 악수도
저 낮은 퀀셋 그림자처럼
우리를 한번 삼키면 다시는 내놓으려 하지 않을 뿐
모습없이 소리없이 고요하기만 한
서남동북 수만 평 넓고 푸른 땅


Silence

If you cross Seoul's Panp'o Bridge you reach the spot:
a vast green field where choppers take off and land
from early morning, extending to the south west
from Samgakji to Sobinggo station
to the south east from Itaewon to Hannam-dong northwards
from Namyong-dong below Namsan as far as Huam-dong.
In old days this was the Choson Army's HQ, of course.
Now take a bus, go and look: across from
Suzie beauty parlor, Crown Golf-shop, Kim's Dry-cleaning,
you see barracks so quiet they seem to be holding their breath.
In the early 1900s simple farmers dressed in white
came to this spot waving hoes in threat,
shouted "Let go of my land!" and shed their blood.
The persimmon trees of old days, sweat-soaked pumpkin beds,
the sneakers that came rushing down the road of liberation,
are all rotting now inside the barbed wire fence
and today, below the grove of white birch trees, you see
the US Army Yongsan Main Post's clear golden emblem
in the sunlight, firmly closed green gates.
And friend, today's footsteps make no noise.
Alliances are sealed in blood, firm handshakes
with flashing white teeth, like the shadows of those squat huts.
If they succeed in making us theirs, they'll never let go again.
Devoid of shape, devoid of sound, simply silent there,
to north and south, east and west, that vast expanse of green.

-translation by Kim Young-Moo and Brother Anthony of Taizé

I don't like this translation. Of course, I can't tell you for certain whether I like the original poem in Korean, or not, since I can't read all of it. But I can tell you that I'm dubious about a lot of line breaks and added punctuation in the translation, and that I'm pretty sure there are some interesting pronoun issues going on (I vs. we) in the original that the translation doesn't even try to address. And I don't like how the translators tried to make the poem as "English" as possible, which doesn't make sense. I know the goal is to translate the poem into English, but I don't like how everything gets changed around to leave you completely devoid of any sense of how the poem sounded or was structured in Korean. Sometimes they go so far as to completely change verbs around in order to (presumably) change the wording into more common English phrasing.

It really annoys me. Korean uses verbs and pronouns and everything in a very different way than English does, and why do we have to ignore that when translating things? What is so scary about translating a poem's phrasing in a way that will sound strange (and interesting!) in English?

Anyway, all that aside, I'm obsessed with the final emotions of this poem, esp. the line "If they succeed in making us theirs, they'll never let go again," which is translated okay, as far as I can tell. I don't want to sound cliché, but: sometimes I forget how recent Korea's history of war and colonization is. And then things like this poem and the (Korean) army base on the mountain behind my school make me remember. Here is a simplification: in the early 1900s, Korea was struggling against Japan; in 1910, Japan took control of Korea and forced everyone to speak Japanese; in 1945, partly due to U.S. involvement in WWII, Korea ceased to be occupied by Japan and was instead occupied by Russia in the North and the U.S. in the South. And then the U.S. troops never left, as they are wont to do.

Some Koreans feel very amicably towards the U.S. They call WWII the Japanese War, and there's still a lot of "Hey, America did us a solid! Yay America!" sentiment. It surprised me when I first got here, but it makes a certain amount of sense. There's far more animosity towards Japan than there is towards the U.S., even though the U.S. is the current presence in South Korea.

But then there's this poem, and I just don't understand why everyone in Korea doesn't resent the continued presence of U.S. Army bases. And why won't the U.S. let go, why did we ever think we had the right to stay.

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?

Saturdays to Grandmother's

Pines, bamboo,
bean field, bean field,
sesame.
Saturdays, I knew
the smell of sesame.

Sesame smell makes me
remember grandmother.

Past the sesame,
board the ferryboat.
White bearded ferryman with the top knot,
tall and thin as the carved guardian pole.
He rowed me over.
I climbed out at the hill.

Sesame field,
sesame, bean,
then past sesame and bean,
bamboo and pine.
In the pine grove, resin smell
made me long for her
even more.

-So Chongju