Today we bring you a poem from a lauded South Korean poet, Sin Yong-Mok, in a translation by Brother Anthony of Taizé that is sensitive to the sonorous aspects of Sin’s lines. If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out the poetry section in the Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote.
Concealed Words
God used up all the summer heat trying to sew the sound of rain inside rain. It was morning when, in order to retrieve one raindrop dropped by mistake, mists roamed the ground.
If there’s a leaky roof the water may be an abraded stone.
I enabled that stone to hear a sound of footsteps.
One day at an estuary I happened to pick up one raindrop. Nobody had stolen the sound of my footsteps.
Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé
Born in Geochang, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea, in 1974, Sin Yong-Mok received a new writers award in 2000 and has published four collections of poetry and a volume of prose essays. He received four awards for his work prior to the collection When Someone Called Someone I Looked Back (2017) which received the 2017 Baek Seok Award for Poetry. He is currently editor of a major Korean literary magazine and lectures about poetry in a variety of institutions.
Brother Anthony of Taizé was born in Cornwall in 1942. A member of the Community of Taizé since 1969, he has been living in Korea since 1980. He is now an emeritus professor of Sogang University (Seoul) and a chair-professor at Dankook University. A prolific translator, since 1990 he has published over forty volumes of translations of Korean literature, mostly contemporary poetry, including (most recently) volumes of poetry by Jeong Ho-Seung, Shim Bo-Seon, Do Jong-Hwan, Oh Sae-Young, Ko Hyeong-Ryeol, Lee Seong-Bok, as well as fiction by Yi Mun-yol.
*****
Read more translations from the Asymptote blog: