Fisherman
It’s the day to haul in the nets, so I set out on my fishing boat. I checked all my gear and offered a prayer to the guardian spirits of the waves. The clear blue skies and easygoing high seas had my heart aflutter. I pull in my nets and what’s that? Not a single fish but just some old skull dangling from the nets. Would you believe it? No shit. In my bewilderment, I was about to hurl the skull back into the sea when I noticed the skull had a rather handsome shape. A shape that seemed familiar and missed after, like a noggin I knew from somewhere. Like the back of my father’s head as he left for the sea, forever, leaving behind a small kid waving by the front gate. It’s you, isn’t it. Is that you, father? Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?
Fund Manager
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We are on the rooftop of a building. Your precious assets are your everything. I am the fruit borne out of the potential to destroy a person’s everything.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We are inside an office. The only thing the vertiginously plummeting arrow of the stock market points to is the ontological exit for a self who doesn’t know where to go.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We are in a hotel in the middle of New York City. According to the proof that wealth and happiness are unrelated, we can further prove that wealth is happiness.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We are on a steel bridge that stretches across a river. Note that the potential to gain everything intersects with the terror that you could lose everything.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We are inside a hot empty beer can. As your will toward both striving and sacrifice to repair broken things approaches an all-time high, the verdict that hits you like lightning goes by two names: Impossibility and Meaninglessness. These indelible names reveal death’s revolutionary qualities.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer. We’re now at a resort in the Mediterranean Sea. Life is pain. Life is a march of horrors advancing toward death. On the road to such a destination, money is but a painkiller. Nevertheless, if you kill yourself, there is also no pain. You no longer even need painkillers.
Have a nice day.
Good afternoon, Valued Customer.
Grave Keeper (Cemetery)
You could call me a “groundskeeper” to soften the blow. While that’s fine, I prefer being called a grave keeper. I spend my days taking care of the grounds where bodies are buried. It figures that I’m just one of many professionals who eke out a living from the dead. Is it because an appreciation for the scent of death courses through my family’s bloodline? Even among my forebears, there were multiple grave keepers. Those ancestors mainly lived out their days as tenant farmers cultivating rice fields other families had set aside to pay for their own familial funeral grounds.
Nary a notable grave, this cemetery is always peaceful. You might see an elderly hiker every now and then, but hardly anyone visits to offer flowers or memorials at the graves. The bulk of the graves are those without family members or those so timeworn that even the surviving family members are no longer. Here, I can sense my future as I gaze at these graves set in time cut off from the past. And from this sense, I feel a spirit of camaraderie.
Grave Keeper (Cosmos)
How far is the distance between my work of maintaining the stars
and my thoughts on being a grave keeper who takes care of dead stars
Between a tree and another tree?
Or perhaps the space
between a star and another star?
Stars that disappear
with an explosion
I hold on
to the ashes of dead stars
When pilgrims in search of lost constellations visit
To those weeping things
I open my palms and show them
the record of a million light years of distress
I know this
I know everything
You know everything, too
From a human perspective we are
infinite
Who are we
and why?
Why?
from Occupational Front
Song Seung Eon
translated from the Korean by Stine An
Listen to "Fisherman," read in the original Korean by the poet:
Occupational Front by Song Seung Eon is a sui generis collection of vignettes exploring the lives of people at work. The star of each vignette is a poet-at-heart who, for various reasons, did not become a poet or could not pursue poetry as a full-time career owing to the harsh realities of life. Written in a range of voices and styles, the book introduces and recommends over seventy occupations of these would-be poets, both real and imagined, from the past, present, future, and across the multiverse, including a Pony Express mail carrier, a sorcerer, an amusement park guide, a nightmare collector, a job placement officer, and even an author. Framed by the “author” as a work-in-progress of a much longer project to “write about all occupations past, present, and future,” several entries also play with metanarratives and counternarratives relating to the labor of literary production. In the original, Song includes an appendix with his author notes for each entry to help demystify the work of the author of Occupational Front and to add to the collective meta-narrativity of the work.
Inspired by August Sander’s documentary portraits of laborers in Weimar-era Germany, Song’s Occupational Front poses these questions with imaginative humor and pathos: Who gets to be a poet? And how do these would-be poets navigate their work lives—whether by daydreaming, dawdling, or transforming their labor into a lived poetry?
As a translator I was particularly drawn to the book’s hybridity, which blends poetry and prose while shifting across voices, styles, and speculative worlds. Each vignette presents a distinct worldview, form, syntax, which required me to inhabit and perform each narrative perspective and set of occupational details with precision and dexterity. Some of the vignettes also reference each other in delightful ways that require consistency and deliberate resonances between speakers. The book’s shifting tonal registers and vocabularies have been both challenging and exhilarating to navigate. For example, according to Song, the speaker in “Fisherman” was born and raised in the southeastern coast of Korea and the original text features the regional dialect of Gyeonsangnam-do. You can hear the regional dialect and South Gyeongsang intonation in Song’s excellent recorded performance in Korean. How do you show the inflections of dialect when direct equivalents might not exist between languages? In this case, I tried to emphasize the dialect indirectly through the diction and conversational tone rather than using a specific dialect in English. After all, what I want to share with each translation is what I experienced as the lived poetry of each would-be poet, from one fellow poet-at-heart—who also makes a living as a non-poet—to another.
Inspired by August Sander’s documentary portraits of laborers in Weimar-era Germany, Song’s Occupational Front poses these questions with imaginative humor and pathos: Who gets to be a poet? And how do these would-be poets navigate their work lives—whether by daydreaming, dawdling, or transforming their labor into a lived poetry?
As a translator I was particularly drawn to the book’s hybridity, which blends poetry and prose while shifting across voices, styles, and speculative worlds. Each vignette presents a distinct worldview, form, syntax, which required me to inhabit and perform each narrative perspective and set of occupational details with precision and dexterity. Some of the vignettes also reference each other in delightful ways that require consistency and deliberate resonances between speakers. The book’s shifting tonal registers and vocabularies have been both challenging and exhilarating to navigate. For example, according to Song, the speaker in “Fisherman” was born and raised in the southeastern coast of Korea and the original text features the regional dialect of Gyeonsangnam-do. You can hear the regional dialect and South Gyeongsang intonation in Song’s excellent recorded performance in Korean. How do you show the inflections of dialect when direct equivalents might not exist between languages? In this case, I tried to emphasize the dialect indirectly through the diction and conversational tone rather than using a specific dialect in English. After all, what I want to share with each translation is what I experienced as the lived poetry of each would-be poet, from one fellow poet-at-heart—who also makes a living as a non-poet—to another.
Song Seung Eon was born in 1986 in Wonju, Gangwon Province, studied creative writing at Chung-Ang University, and debuted as a poet in 2011 in the prestigious South Korean literary monthly Hyundae Munhak (Contemporary Literature). Song is the author of four collections of poetry and prose, including 직업 전선 (Occupational Front; Spring Days Books, 2022), 사랑과 교육 (Love and Education; Minumsa, 2019), and 철과 오크 (Iron and Oak; Moonji Books, 2015), and won the Park In-hwan Literary Award in 2016. He is a member of the poetry collective jaknan 작란(作亂), meaning both “riot” and “play”.
Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer based in New York City whose translations and poems have appeared in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in literature from Harvard College and an MFA in literary arts from Brown University, and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, The PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her full-length translations include Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press, 2025), and her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
