A Devotional
No longer I do bad things
for I’ve been too busy thinking of doing harm
A close friend of mine gave me chives grown on her window ledge
I rinse those chives—neatly aligned—under cold tap water
I panfry chive pancakes in an iron pan—a gift from a friend I like
When eating the pancakes with chopsticks
no longer I listen to bad music
for it gets in the way of piecing together bad thoughts
Solely focused on worshiping chives I am, when eating chives
Against the opposite window I study my reflection
who puts down her chopsticks
Why do you always look like the one wrongfully accused
Has your malady ceased
Has the screaming vanished
Do you want me to make your condition worse with my own malady
Are you devoted to praising the virtue of being ordinary with extraordinary care
It wouldn’t be necessary to
translate you as too tough or too intimidating
You sleep over the fact that
everything is awful and that
the single most awful thing is you so that
you can wake up to the next life
I become inured to everything even if
nothing makes sense
I can barely put up with myself who has grown inured to everything
All I can do is lift my chopsticks and
eat the remaining chive pancakes
*
What if this world were presented as an answer
What might be the question
Would it be stronger and greener chives
How could a malady that stops being ill pretend to be ill
In return for the chives I gifted an adorable plush toy to the friend
In return for the iron pan I gifted a beautiful picture book to the friend
What adorable pretty
tender nice gestures
Whenever I’m alone all the bad things dawn on me
And yet I don’t do bad things any more
Those neatly aligned chives
Those fresh green chives
Firm Grip
I once hurled a desk clock
—an ordinary thing I had a perfect grip on
I hurled it at the floor and
it shattered into pieces
A thing broken made a sound while breaking as if
it were intent on being audible to me
Those letters strewn with adorations and
a sheet of vows
I had deliberately torn into pieces
using both my hands
How feathery they are, I reckon
I had torn them into pieces, slowly, changing the angle of my wrists
A thing torn also made a sound while torn as if
it were, in its sharp high pitch, intent on
being inscribed in my ear
A thing collapsed also
made a roaring sound when falling down as if
to demonstrate in its rumbling eloquence that
it could not afford to withstand any longer
All these sounds I do
remember
As if my memories of them
were a testament to my being not guilty
All these I do remember and yet
things undone seldom make a single sound
They are to be gradually undone in quiet
Not until they are completely wrecked
are they discovered
Riveted on memories and wary of the past sounds
I’ve become deaf in a long complete quiet
Awoken at midnight I found my plant
drawing a sword and aiming at me like an assassin
With my neck under the blade
I dried myself up as if I were a fig
I cannot wait to see the day I’ll be halved
and unfold my innards teeming with swarming red ants
This morning I found my plant
finally halving the pot which
had once arrested
massive gross writhing roots
Dear i
Even when I’m eating, I feel I am ruthless. How about you?
Last winter I threw away a dead tree. I had buried its already dried-up roots in the ground and put it as erect as a tree is supposed to be. Last winter I should have been thrown away like that, and now I am turning mad little by little. I turned mad to a degree no one would notice. I saw my hair aflame in the mirror and discerned a sheer flicker of the flame in the quiet. I liked it. I made a beaming face, which could cry her eyes out and laugh her head off. I cried my eyes out. I laughed my head off. I loved it. Once I asked a stranger, crouching in sunny shade, why she was not even crying. Then I noticed that she’d already teared up. She is evidently a pebble. Turns out I spotted a crying pebble. That pebble cried out: I am going crazy! I happened to spot a pebble that yelled out loud. She hunched even more and her crouching became her. The pebble said it would live sheltered in it forever.
Are you still a stranger to yourself? Is something inexplicable still occurring to you every day? Are you giving your best wishes to the day no one shows enmity? Are you awestruck by the day you don’t have to show any favor? Are you living in a moment as if you were asked to take the witness stand in a trial you know little of? Are you, still, still, terrified by what you were fearful of?
How are you doing? Are you still writing at Starbucks, fuming at the feeling that your poem is not elusive enough? Are you still avoiding things which you believe to be too good to be yours? Do you still struggle with the feeling that you are devouring a baby hedgehog whenever eating strawberries and locating their seeds? Do you still place your plants outside of your home because they make a lot of sounds? Are you grinding your teeth while dreaming to stifle unrehearsed confessions? Once you said, you liked it here because you couldn’t tell where you were. I too liked it here, then. I liked it not because you felt you were lost but because you didn’t suggest we go somewhere else. How could I not be excited at the sight of the tree I had thrown away last winter blooming baby green leaves and light pink flowers! I am currently living with that stranger. A correction: with that pebble. I turned into a pebble right next to it. It appears as if we were a crying pebble and a laughing pebble. As if we were a pebble that yells its lungs out next to a crazy pebble. She at times sings out loud while screaming and yelling! I hum, with my eyes closed.
This would sometimes occur to me.
Another Version
Day after day you related a story that pivoted around the day we first met. You recalled how we took the courage to hold each other’s hand. How we’d spent the entire night holding hands tight in an arctic park. I was quietly riveted on the version of the story. We morphed into precisely who we used to be and what we used to look like by repeating the version of us over and over. I kept listening and listening. Just like I used to like holding a plush bear while scared of the bear. I loved that version of the story. I loved to see how rapt you were in recounting the story. I loved to notice subtle changes made in the repetitions over time. I loved the way our first day was contained within the story. I was thrilled to find today postponed and tomorrow having yet to come because you were so busy bringing our origin story here. I loved how farther away our first day drifted from us. I loved to find that the version of our first day couldn’t get any further away from our first day together. As if adorable cheeks would grow into intimidating cocks, which would scurry around the yard, and then be slaughtered. I was thrilled to see how the past version of us obscures who we are now. As if leftover cake is assailed by swarming red ants. I was engrossed in how your version of us neatly devoured who we are now. I liked how our first day would still be shivering in the cold in that park. I loved the prospect of us subject to decay in that park, holding tight each other’s hand.
from Dear i
Kim So Yeon
translated from the Korean by Inhye Ha
Listen to:
The four poems printed here are part of Kim So Yeon’s fifth poetry collection entitled Dear i. “A Devotional,” “Firm Grip,” “Dear i,” and “Another Version” invariably resonate with the poet’s keen interest in the particular and the ordinary. Kim’s poetic language is distinctly sinewy even when it stems from thorough introspection. The legion of her poetry illustrates myriad embodied experiences with subtlety and nuanced variations. Kim’s poetry can be viewed as a testing ground for the possibility of intersecting aesthetics and politics.
As a translator who has been avidly reading all of Kim’s published poems, I am always struck by the ways in which the poet incorporates subdued viscerality into descriptions of even mundane events—as exemplified in the “swarming red ants,” the “wriggling roots,” and the cocks “scurrying around” and to be abruptly “slaughtered.” This invites a reader to expand the horizon of their sensorial experience and mull over things on another level. Thus, when translating these poems, I sought to convey the poet’s searing language faithfully to the original. When translating “A Devotional,” I wanted to underline its peculiar meditative mood firmly grounded in one of the most ordinary scenes. While working on “Firm Grip,” I deliberately added the qualifier “firm,” although its original Korean title is simply “Grip,” to accentuate the firmness or strength inherent in that particular action. I take the firmness of one’s grip, which can be found in some of Kim’s other poems, as touching on an existential, ontological struggle. As for “Dear i,” the titular poem of the 2018 poetry collection, I would like to draw a reader’s attention to how rhythmic regularity is created and sustained within this prose poem. The poet's pacing of the narrative is noteworthy. Kim deftly increases speed and intensity and closes the poem with an anticlimactic period.
“Another Version”—the first prose poem contained in Dear i—therefore makes a perfect companion piece to “Dear i” in that it encapsulates a similar pace and movement. In “Another Version,” the poet illustrates the dissolution, if not demise, of what was once held dear by the poetic speaker by vacillating between two temporal points. The tie between the past and the present is described as tenuous and yet evocatively intertwined, recreating continuously what once was and what is now.
As a translator who has been avidly reading all of Kim’s published poems, I am always struck by the ways in which the poet incorporates subdued viscerality into descriptions of even mundane events—as exemplified in the “swarming red ants,” the “wriggling roots,” and the cocks “scurrying around” and to be abruptly “slaughtered.” This invites a reader to expand the horizon of their sensorial experience and mull over things on another level. Thus, when translating these poems, I sought to convey the poet’s searing language faithfully to the original. When translating “A Devotional,” I wanted to underline its peculiar meditative mood firmly grounded in one of the most ordinary scenes. While working on “Firm Grip,” I deliberately added the qualifier “firm,” although its original Korean title is simply “Grip,” to accentuate the firmness or strength inherent in that particular action. I take the firmness of one’s grip, which can be found in some of Kim’s other poems, as touching on an existential, ontological struggle. As for “Dear i,” the titular poem of the 2018 poetry collection, I would like to draw a reader’s attention to how rhythmic regularity is created and sustained within this prose poem. The poet's pacing of the narrative is noteworthy. Kim deftly increases speed and intensity and closes the poem with an anticlimactic period.
“Another Version”—the first prose poem contained in Dear i—therefore makes a perfect companion piece to “Dear i” in that it encapsulates a similar pace and movement. In “Another Version,” the poet illustrates the dissolution, if not demise, of what was once held dear by the poetic speaker by vacillating between two temporal points. The tie between the past and the present is described as tenuous and yet evocatively intertwined, recreating continuously what once was and what is now.
Kim So Yeon is an award-winning South Korean poet. Kim's poetry has, since the publication of her 1993 debut poem ‘Urineun chanyanghanda’ (We praise the wasted time), been marked by her unsparing language. As her six major poetry collections testify, Kim has created a poetic language that lays bare, dissects, and eventually reinvents what surrounds her. Her sustained interest in the particular and the ordinary is notable. More importantly, Kim’s astute observations of the quotidian point toward the ways in which we humans are imbricated in the grid of power.
Kim has, to date, published six major poetry collections: 극에 달하다 (Reaching the Extreme; Moonji, 1996), 빛들의 피곤이 밤을 끌어 당긴다 (The Fatigue of the Lights Draws the Night; Minumsa, 2006), 눈물이라는 뼈 (The Bones We Call Tears; Moonji, 2009), 수학자의 아침 (A Mathematician’s Morning; Moonji, 2013), i에게 (Dear i; Achimdal, 2018), and 촉진하는 밤(Catalyzing Night; Moonji, 2023). For the last thirty or more years Kim never ceases to surprise her wide-ranging readership with her relentless efforts to redefine and maintain relevance and contemporaneity. She is the recipient of the Nojak Literary Award (2010), the Hyundae Literary Award (2011), the Yi Yuksa Poetry Prize (2015), and the Modern Poetry Award (2020). Most recently, Kim won the Cheongma Literary Award (2024).
Inhye Ha is an Associate Professor in the Department of English language and literature at Incheon National University, Incheon, South Korea. She earned her PhD in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focusing on eighteenth-century literature and critical theory. She has since published articles on women’s writing, posthumanism, and early modern science in various journals. Ha’s 2018 article on Anna Barbauld’s animal poems, published in Studies in Romanticism (57 [3]: 453-478), interrogates the possibility of making interspecies community. Her 2021 article (Contemporary Women’s Writing 15 [3]: 52-71) on Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014) describes the stakes of retelling narratives from a feminist perspective. Currently, Ha is working on how illness narratives and disability are represented in both early modern and contemporary texts. Beyond her research and teaching, Ha has actively engaged in translation, such as her 2021 Korean translation of Kate Manne’s Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020) and her 2019 co-translation with Jayeon Kang of Nancy B. Reich’s Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Cornell University Press, 1985).
