As the editor of a world literature journal who’s read submissions across all genres for more than six years now, I’m always on the look-out for a certain cosmic echo when one piece of writing rhymes with another from a different continent, as if confirming our shared humanity. Last week’s poem by Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral, addressed from mother to daughter, is perfectly answered by these elegiac verses by Korean counterpart Moon Taejun mourning a departed mother, and capturing a magnificent stillness.
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief
My Mother’s Prayer Beads
One day my mother sat blankly as she fingered her cold prayer beads.
My mother lowered her head as though mending some frayed clothes. She mustered the flowers, thunders, grasshoppers, and snowstorms; she also called upon my dead granny, me who was ailing, and my maternal uncle who lived afar. Silently, she bound up small scraps of cloth. Then she called upon the terrifying darkness, the valley fog, the roaring fire, and the stars on high. A faint, lengthy song arose from my mother’s bosom like it did when she used to sing me to sleep. She hummed the simplest song that all – the stag beetle, the puny bird, the eight-year-old child, the ninety-year-old granny, the parched verdure, the flock of sheep and its meadow, and creatures with menacing teeth – would know. The song my mother sang was fettered by her cold prayer beads while the things that she called upon spiralled in orderly circles and soared into the glistening winter sky.
A Faraway Place
Today the air teems with words of goodbye.
A handful, a handful at a time, I breathe the words of goodbye.
A faraway place comes forth.
As it pushes me little by little, a faraway place comes forth.
I would bring with me the first newly sprouted leaf, her lips, her crimson
cheeks, and her beaming eyes that make me shy.
The air raises my heart, like a fragile piece of ice, and passes me by.
The barren tree sheds and sheds its leaves and the rock governs the dim
light of the stone’s shadow.
The bench sits at the same spot all day long with a frame on which nobody
is seated even now.
Hands quivered, eyes damped, and at a loss for words.
When everybody speaks of farewells,
a faraway place comes forth,
somewhere we can hardly fathom.
Moon Taejun (b. 1970) earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees in Korean Language and Literature, and began his literary career in 1994. As a leading poet who carries the tradition of Korean traditional lyric poetry, he has distinguished himself and gained prominence inside and outside the Korean literary world. His writings include Crowded Backyard, Bare Foot, Flatfish, The Growth of a Shadow, A Faraway Place, prose collection The Heart of a Laggard, poetry commentaries Where Poems Do Not Bloom 2, A Blossoming World in Our Hearts 1, Silent Gaze Upon Love, and so on. The Growth of a Shadow has been translated and published in the United States of America (Autumn Hill Books, 2011). Moon is a recipient of the Sowol Poetry Prize (2006), Midang Literary Award (2005), Yushim Literary Prize (2005), Nojak Literary Prize (2004), Dongseo Literary Prize (2004), and Munye Joongang New Writer Award (1994).
Hannah Pang graduated from the Korea University Graduate School of International Studies with a Masters in International Studies. She earned her undergraduate degree in Geography at the National University of Singapore. Since 2013, Hannah has translated for numerous organizations. A Faraway Place is her first translated literary work.
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