Acclaimed poet Kim So-yeon weaves abstraction into longing in this week’s Translation Tuesday. Kim’s speaker examines the life of a Mathematician haunted by memories of intimate sensations: an embrace, a heartbeat, the sound of an imagined breath. Fragments of the Mathematician’s embodied experience are juxtaposed with jarring moments of disembodied calculation. This confluence of abstraction and sensation becomes existential as the process of dying is compared to a triangle, a line, even absolute pi. Between these mathematical similes, Kim deftly illustrates a life confined by rational linearity, but which also pines for the tangible, the organic, and the non-linear.
Mathematician’s Morning
I will die for a moment
like a triangle
Look around the quiet shadows of still objects
A birdcage starts moving around around
A person being hugged thinks about invisibility
while embracing the person being hugged more tightly
This is to imagine memory
to see an ant crawled into an eyeball
or winter turned into flesh, or the Southern Cross of the southern sea
I will die for a moment
like a neat line
Mathematician closes the eyes
To count the breaths of the invisible person
To count the binary oppositions in inhale-exhale intervals
The sound of breath The sound of palpitation The sound of pulse
tumble in and out of Mathematician’s ear
Think of humble joy nested in a humble body
I have lived long forgotten such tears and such sighs
Even though I am not living so well
Will die for a moment,
thinking of absolute pi never witnessed anywhere
The person’s breath touches Mathematician’s eyelashes
Imagine the length of a straight line eventually makes an inevitable curve.
Translated from the Korean by Megan Sungyoon
Kim So Yeon was born in 1967 in Gyeongju. She was educated at the Catholic University of Korea (BA, MA, Korean Literature). In 1993, she published her first poem “We Praise” in the quarterly Hyundae Poetry and Thought. She has published the poetry collections Pushed to the Limit, The Exhaustion of Stars Pulls the Night, Bones Called Tears, A Mathematician’s Morning, and the essay collections Heart Dictionary and The World of Siot. She is the recipient of the Nojak Literary Award (2010) and the Hyundae Literary Award (2011).
Megan Sungyoon is a translator based in New York and Seoul. An MFA candidate in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University, Sungyoon is the Print Translation Editor of Columbia Journal.
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