from Net of Light

Choi Jeongrye

1 mg of Anesthetic

1 mg of anaesthetic put me to sleep
Sending me

Wandering across glaciers

Having to scale an iceberg
Ascending
A mountain of unused drugs

1 mg was too heavy
Clinging on to just 1 mg
I struggled to move up

I wanted to shrug it off, that 1 mg

It was so heavy
Mom, mom, mom
I called my late mother

And the wide-open glacier echoed back



No Rabbits Though

Shall we go or not?
You yell
But how should I know?
I wish I could disappear
From everything I have to do
Which I don’t do

Instead
I pack some water, a map and a rabbit
A rabbit? No rabbits, no
That’s a no-go

But we set off, we cross a hill
And another, hippity-hop
We keep going, unable to go on
 
No rabbits, no, but lots of rabbit grass
Rows of apartment blocks with alleys in between
Without rabbits around, there’s plenty of rabbit grass
 
Shall we go or not?
We go and we do not
But then
We take an unexpected turn

We drag our dog along
Who tugs at his leash to sniff the rabbit grass
When you look at what’s visible
The invisible remains hidden

People, hemming and hawing
Nose-deep in rabbit grass
They’re not rabbits
Instead of rabbits
Invisible people
Cooped up in apartment blocks



Syllogisms

A few goats managed to climb a tree
Dangling from its branches like mysterious fruit
Passing by a cottage with goats on the roof
We wheezed for a while
That day we hiked up the mountain
Walking and laughing hand in hand
Watching our grown-up children
Each one dangling from their own branch
We get up to have breakfast
Then drop our spoons without a word
See you later
Off to work
Where we talk to people
Who talk back to us
Watching chauvinist people say chauvinist things on TV
I get worked up like them
They speak in syllogisms
Apartments are made of concrete
Concrete is a mixture of cement, water and gravel
Therefore apartments are made of those three things
Their viewpoints are unchangeable
Vodka is made of potatoes
Potatoes are vegetables
Therefore vodka is salad
As someone might paraphrase them
They say they listen but they don’t care what you say
We don’t eat to live
We live to eat
As the age-old maxim goes
The goats stay up the tree
Not to eat, I think
Nor to live
If you ask me
They went up
Just to go up
And now they’re there
Unable to come back down



To Each Their Own Way

Birds fly by in V-formation
Tracing a parabola through the air
The wingbeat changes with every lead bird
One eye open, one eye closed
They sleep and fly
With a compass in their eyes
Guiding them somewhere north
Something to do with quantum mechanics
Or so they say

The birds don’t mind me at all
Or this army of cars on Gangbyeon Highway
They don’t care about
These solitary creatures wrapped in layers of steel
These individuals stuck in traffic jams
This row of riverside apartments
This murky gray winter sky
These profit-yielding properties
Owned by cold-blooded profiteers
Against a backdrop of impenetrable safety glass
High above the standstill
Of people in a rush
The birds in V-formation
Fly on and on
In the opposite direction
No reason, no correlation
Everyone must go their own way
Monday Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Friday Saturday

 

Particle Staccato

Glimmering things
Flowing things
Merge into one, it turns out

If rivers are eternal bodies
Eternal particles make them glimmer

You, already dead, continue to flow                                             
While I, still alive
Remain to watch the glimmer

Meaningful, in a way
Meaningless, in a way
Particles float towards
Reckless seas and masses of sameness

translated from the Korean by Mattho Mandersloot

Read the original in Korean

Listen to the text read in the original Korean by the translator:

I’ve been translating Choi since I first came across her work at her 2018 reading in London, which left me enthralled. At the reading, hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies, she forever changed my perception of poetry. Choi made me realize poetry is not only for everyone; it is also everywhere. As she often uses personal experiences as her starting point, her poetry seemed to say: you only need to look closely enough in order to find something poetic in the everyday.

Choi and I stayed in touch after her reading and when I moved from the UK to Korea in 2019, she was among the first people to whom I reached out. I was overwhelmed by her warm-hearted response. Not only did she propose to meet on a weekly basis―a kind of “poetry exchange”―she went above and beyond providing me with a warmer welcome than I could ever have imagined: from something as practical as handing down to me her old teacups, all the way to helping me find my feet in a more emotional sense.

Thinking back to our sessions, I can only marvel at the humor, joy and positivity she brought to the table. Even when, much later, she called me from the hospital, recovering from intensive treatment after being diagnosed with a rare blood disease, I could hear warmth in her voice. She wrote “1 mg of Anesthetic”, included here, from a hospital bed. It was her friend Lee Sumyeong who organized a memorial service after her death in 2021. I find it beautifully serendipitous that they should meet again in this issue.

I would like to thank the participants of my translation seminar last year at The Queen’s College, Oxford for their thoughts on “To Each Their Own Way”, which we workshopped together. I am also indebted to the National Centre for Writing for facilitating a translation residency in 2021, where I worked on these poems and George Szirtes for providing excellent guidance during the residency.

Choi Jeongrye was born in 1955 in Hwaseong, a city near Seoul. She studied Korean poetry at Korea University and made her literary debut in 1990 in the magazine Hyeondae Sihak (Contemporary Poetry). Throughout her career, she published seven collections of poetry and translated a collection of prose poems by James Tate, entitled Return to the City of White Donkeys (Ecco, 2005), into Korean. Along with Brenda Hillman and Wayne De Fremery, she also co-translated Instances (Parlor Press, 2011), a selection of her own poems translated into English. Among other awards, she received the Hyundae Munhak Award (2007) and the Midang Literary Award (2015). After being diagnosed with a rare blood disease, Choi passed away at the age of 66 in 2021.

Mattho Mandersloot is a literary translator working from Korean into English and Dutch. A former taekwondo athlete, he earned a BA in classics from King’s College London, an MA in Translation from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MSt in Korean studies from Oxford. Among others, he has translated bestselling authors Cho Nam-joo and Sang Young Park. He has led several poetry translation workshops at the Poetry Translation Centre in London and in 2020 he was awarded The Korea Times’ 51st Modern Korean Literature Translation Award for poetry.