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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.