Poem 9 Muzzle
Every day was a spate of gusts and now a largish hand touches my waist. Just when the smell of my sweat seeps through the ecstatic vales of my fingerprints: fire. I shall fire. In my digestive tract I feel the stout gun barrel its slick muzzle kissing the back of my clenched teeth. Then at the moment I close my eyes for the blast just what have I spit in lieu of a bullet.
Poem 10 Butterfly
In the tattered wallpaper I see a dying butterfly. It’s a secretive mouthpiece a hotline to the other world. One day in my glassed beard I see a dying butterfly withered and feeding on the poor dew that respiration makes. If I die with my palm over the mouthpiece the butterfly too shall spring away. Words like these are never to be let out.
Poem 11
The porcelain cup resembles my skull. When I clutch that cup my arm shoots out a graft of an arm whose hand raises high the porcelain cup to slam it down on the floor. Since my arm defends the porcelain cup with its life shattered to a thousand shivers is my skull which resembles the porcelain cup. If my arm had moved before the branched arm could slither back into my arm the blank sheet dam will have been torn. Still my arm’s defense of the porcelain cup is as ever unrelenting.
Poem 12
Down swoops a loose bundle of dirty laundry. It’s a flight of white pigeons. Campaigning the end of the war from the other side of that palm-sized piece of the sky. The pigeons pile around mucking out their plumes. Here on this side of the palm-sized sky a foul war commences and the filth clubbed to death. Once the air is rendered sooty the flock again takes wing to the other side of the palm-sized sky.
Poem 13
My arms and the razor blade, clenched by them fell. Upon inspection they are as though, menaced by something and sickly pale. These two limbs which I had thus lost I, hoisted to embellish my room with candlelight. Even dead they, seem all the more fearful of me. Such a nuance I find lovelier even than the potted flower.
Poem 14
In front of that old castle is a field of grass and on the grass I have laid my hat. From the battlement I tied a weighty stone to all that I remembered and cast it off with all my might. The sad cry of history’s trajectory against its own parabola. Suddenly I see down below a beggar standing like a totem pole next to my hat. In truth that mendicant is at a higher place than me. Or is it the specter of a synthesized history. The depth of my hat which is open to the air cries out for an imminent sky. In a wink the mendicant shaking like a leaf stoops and tosses a rock into my hat. Already I passed out. A map is visible where the heart is routed to the skull. A cold cold hand chills my forehead to the bone. Branding in my forehead a handprint to stay.
Poem 15
1
I find myself in an interior with no mirror. Me-in-the-mirror has surely gone out. For fear of him I tremble. From where and how does this sinister figure machinate against me.
2
In a cooled bed I slept cradling a crime. I was absent in my certain dream and my military boots which held prosthetics soiled my dream’s blank sheets.
3
I steal into an interior with a mirror. To release me from the mirror. But crestfallen and without fail he too and in sync enters. Bestows his regret upon me. Imprisoned by me as I am by him me-in-the-mirror too trembles.
4
My dream where I am absent. My mirror where my counterfeit does not appear. Yearner for my solitude to whom even incompetence is OK. Finally I have decided to prescribe suicide to him. I indicate the awning window which does not even have a view. The sole purpose of that window is suicide. But he cannot go before I kill myself he instructs me. Me-in-the-mirror is almost a deathless bird.
5
I occulted my heart with metal held the pistol up to the mirror and aiming leftward the chest pulled the trigger. The bullet dug into where his heart should be but his heart is to the right.
6
Crimson ink spilled out from the carbon heart. In my dream to which I am late I’ve been sentenced to capital punishment. It is not I who rules my dreams. I am guilty of a grave crime for holding captive the very two who cannot even shake hands.
from Crow’s Eye View
I Sang
translated from the Korean by Dan Kwon
Listen to the original read by the translator:
Crow’s-Eye View was first published as serialized poems in the daily newspaper Chosunjoongangilbo, from July 24 to August 8, 1934. Overwhelmed by complaints from subscribers, who condemned the poems to be overly abstruse, if not meaningless, and the work of someone afflicted with insanity, the series met its premature end after fifteen installments. For this occasion, I share my translation of the second half of the series.
Now, this magnum opus by I Sang has already been translated into English by many. Most translations that I was able to find, however, didn’t quite satisfy my appetite for Crow’s-Eye View in the English language. This is most likely due to the series’ notoriously difficult intelligibility. And I am certain that other experts of I Sang and his sensibilities will find some bone to pick with me in my translation. I look forward to that.
I would like to thank I Sang for the existence of his work; every scholar and translator of I Sang for their inspiring labor, and Rosa Aiello for her invaluable counsel throughout this project.
Now, this magnum opus by I Sang has already been translated into English by many. Most translations that I was able to find, however, didn’t quite satisfy my appetite for Crow’s-Eye View in the English language. This is most likely due to the series’ notoriously difficult intelligibility. And I am certain that other experts of I Sang and his sensibilities will find some bone to pick with me in my translation. I look forward to that.
I would like to thank I Sang for the existence of his work; every scholar and translator of I Sang for their inspiring labor, and Rosa Aiello for her invaluable counsel throughout this project.
I Sang was—among many things—a Korean avant-garde poet. Born in 1910 in Seoul, he was native to Korea under Japanese colonial rule. He died in 1937 during his very first visit to Tokyo, which the young modernist had imagined to be the premier locus of "modern spirit" in the East. He quickly became disillusioned, however, once he finally arrived in the capital of Imperial Japan; in a letter to a friend he described the place as "nauseating", "nothing more than a pretentious simulation" with "surfaces with a Western stench". There, he was detained by the police for "suspicious behavior", and his chronic tubercular condition worsened, leading to his death at a nearby hospital due to consumption. “I’d like some melon from the fruiterer” are said to be I Sang’s final words.
Dan Kwon is an American-born artist and translator living and working in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in the US and Meisterschüler from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Germany. He has exhibited at Museum für Moderne Kunst and Johanne in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; as a member of IMPURE FICTION at Kunstverein Hannover, Sprengel Museum, and Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany; and in collaboration with Rosa Aiello at Destiny’s Atelier in Oslo, Norway. His writings and translations can be found in publications and exhibitions around the world.
