With nine books of poetry to her name, Ra Heeduk—winner of the Midang Literary Award in 2014—has worked with the genre to interrogate the personal and the political since the 1980s. Yet, in one of her more recent poems, her persona confesses: “Here, poetry grows to resemble hieroglyphics // Dirt, not language, rustles in my mouth.” It is as if, after decades of prolific output, poetry becomes a stranger, turns suddenly into an enigma. As translator Emily Bettencourt explains below, these poems—drawn from Ra’s 2018 collection, Codename Poetry—are urgent reflections on the role of the writer in shaping culture and politics at a time when this very figure is met with suspicion. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we are proud to present three poems that resonate with what Brecht famously said about art in dark times, that “Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.”
“Codename Poetry was published at the end of 2018, but to fully understand the context of the collection, it’s better to go back to April 16, 2014, when the Sewol Ferry sank off the western coast of Korea. What followed was a dark period during which many poets and writers felt they were incapable of creating meaningful work in the wake of such a disaster—what could they possibly write that would even begin to touch their cultural grief? In the following years, former president Park enacted a cultural blacklist where creatives who criticized her government were stripped of funding and publishers who touched their work were shut down. Even the poets who felt like they could create meaningful and critical work following the disaster feared being blacklisted. In March 2017, Park was impeached and the blacklist ended. In this context, Codename Poetry contains an incisive commentary on the Sewol Ferry disaster itself, even as it reflects on other tragedies and the universality of grief. In the author’s note to the collection, Ra writes that because her life has been ravaged by teeth and claws, the words inside her have grown claws as well; this collection is her attempt to set them free. To me, this collection is an urgent reflection on the role of poetry and art in politics and society, as well as on the bonds formed by shared suffering—a reflection that is just as necessary today as it was three years ago.”
— Emily Bettencourt
Codename Poetry1
They trapped him inside a file called “Poetry”
because they believed even lyric poems to be seditious
The file likely contained the following:
A handful of hair
A few pieces of fingernail
A hand towel with a frayed corner
A plaid jacket
An old leather bag and a few books
A spoon and a fork
A bundle of edited manuscripts
A pair of silver-rimmed glasses in a green case
A bottle of silence
A few leaves from the forest floor
His body odor left on bandages was bottled in glass
and everything that comprised him
likely went into the file called “Poetry”
Along with his poems, of course
They would have recorded even these things:
What bulbs he planted in his flowerbed
How many letters he received from abroad
What he talked about with a thrush in the forest
How he looked at the moth asleep on the hem of his shirt
How many buckets of water he drew per day
With whom he drank jasmine tea
Which books he borrowed from the library
What he talked about with his students in class
Why he stopped on the path as he walked home at sunset
What expression he wore as he crossed the border
What exactly was seditious about these days of love?
What they feared
was that he carried words that could open minds,
that he lived attending to the roots of the heart,
and that even as he labored as a locksmith
he never stopped writing poetry
Poems released from Codename “Poetry”
now glitter quietly in the sunlight
Out from between the sentences that endured his life,
someone is walking, barefoot, wearing no shadow
Paper Prison
So here, in this room where anyone can turn the light on and off, this room
where anyone can
freely lock the door and leave—you crouched for this long?
Refilling your thinning blood with ink
So you lived here, between these
walls filled with books and perilous piles of documents,
moving from this book to that, from this chair to that,
eating crumbs of paper?
This prison is safe and liberal
Those who visit do not realize it is a prison
Even the guards are gone, having forgotten my confinement
Here, poetry grows to resemble hieroglyphics
Dirt, not language, rustles in my mouth, and
I will probably struggle to leave on my own feet
just like words printed on paper
whether I rot or wither away
Just like how a brick house can become a brick tomb in an instant,
one day these paper walls will crumble
and a face will be discovered among the wreckage
Do not expect poetry to sprout from this paper
So today, in this old room, this room that gets sun for barely thirty minutes
a day,
you discovered it wasn’t just the fluorescent light that glimmered
unsteadily?
Evening’s Q&A
—What is in your heart right now?
—People carrying walking sticks that have sprouted.
—What must you do with those people?
—I must wait, until they put down their walking sticks.
—Who is that person walking toward us?
—That person has no face.
—What grows longer in the evening?
—Shadows.
—Who waits at the end of the rusty tracks?
—Darkness or fog.
—When will this uphill end?
—It ends when we die.
—Between a dove and a snake, which should you choose?
—The truth lies between the dove and the snake.
—How do you pronounce these impossible consonants?
—Mix in vowels like spit.
—But what are you carrying?
—A walking stick with a sprout.
—Until when will you carry that walking stick?
—Until it no longer sprouts.
1 Codename “Poetry” is the name of the file compiled by the intelligence bureau of former East Germany on poet Reiner Kunze.
Translated from the Korean by Emily Bettencourt
Ra Heeduk is a South Korean poet and professor of literature at Chosun University. She was born in 1966 in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, and was raised by missionary parents at different orphanages for the first twenty years of her life. She attended Yonsei University during the 1980s, where she turned to poetry during the pro-democracy movement to help reconcile her frustration at being caught between her parents’ Christian values and her anger at society. She published two poetry collections, Dear Roots and The Words Stained the Leaves, before winning the Kim Soo-young Literature Prize in 1989. She was also awarded This Year’s Young Artist Award in 2001, the Contemporary Literature Prize in 2003, and the Midang Literary Award in 2014. In total, she has published nine poetry collections, three essay collections, two books of poetry theory, and three compilations.
Emily Bettencourt is a translator of Korean literature and poetry. They spent more than half a decade in Seoul and graduated from the Korean Literature Translation Institute in 2019 before returning to their native Portland, OR. They are the translator of Cha Minju’s Philosophizing about BTS (Bimilsincer, 2020) and Kim Namguk’s BTS Insight (Bimilsincer, 2021). Their translations of Lee Jenny’s poems have appeared in Puerto del Sol, and they are a regular contributor to chogwa.
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