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Death; Jebu Island, and also Rain

May 28, 2014/in Summer-Fall 2014, Translation, Translation / by Kim Myung Won, translated from the Korean by EJ Koh

deathDeath

 

We shrouded Father’s body,
which could not wash itself.

We carried you to the church
where you used to step boldly inside for mass at dawn
everyday with your arthritic legs.

We carried you all the way to the grave
you couldn’t walk to by yourself
and laid you carefully inside your home.

We couldn’t help it even though
you so hated to owe anyone.

 

jebuisland1Jebu Island, and also Rain

 

It is
raining

Somewhere on Earth,
someone has died standing

so rain falls as a single
standing column.

Returning from the funeral service,
I shower and darkness
seeps into my entire body.

One long night,
seamen that loved the sea with cut wrists
jebuisland2wobble, spilling the sperm of flowers.

Countless abandoned girls on the shore
clean their private parts without a sound.

The seashores are locked into a deep sleep.

At the point when rain and sea are inseparable,
sadness like a string of dark clouds
strangles my neck.

Screams freely
flow out into the world.

 

The root of my desire to translate, which is selfish, is the same thing that keeps me from the perfect translation. Translating Kim Myung Won’s poems, I wanted to break open my own memories of South Korea for the reader: washing dishes in a bucket out on the street, jumping on trampolines over the rooftops of neon buildings, tasting squid so spicy that I shove both nostrils full of mayonnaise. But inevitably, I got in the way of myself. I fixated on the words and how I rearranged them—for my own benefit as a Korean American poet. In the end, I realized her words were only ropes. And what I needed to translate, in fact, were not the ropes themselves, but what those ropes were tied to.

Last summer, my mother introduced me to her childhood friend Kim Myung Won, who was vacationing in the States during her professorship at Daejeon University of South Korea where she taught Korean Literature. Not only did I have direct communication with Kim Myung Won throughout the translation process, my father provided insight behind meanings that I often did not recognize. For instance, it is normal in Korean culture to follow ceremonies from Shintoism at birth, Christianity at the time of marriage, and Buddhism at death. Even more, what many of my colleagues were not privy to: I was reunited just last year with my parents after eight years of separation. Translating these poems with my family was the first thing we had done together, and somehow, we vanished the distance that had been wedged between us—from both verbal communication and cultural differences.

As Jorge Luis Borges said Don Quixote “wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version,” I hope Kim Myung Won’s poems survive me. Rather than override her subjects with impassioned verbosity, I hope to be a vessel for them. For me, my pursuit exists in the tonal, in creating something that sticks to the ribs, and I learned that could not happen with words alone. I aimed to translate her poems less with the mind, and though it took many years to learn, more with the heart.

Kim Myung WonKim Myung Won is a professor of Korean Literature at Daejeon University in South Korea. She earned her BA at Ehwa Womans University in Seoul and authored several books of poetry. Contact her at

 

 

 

EJ KohEJ Koh is a poet, translator of Korean poetry, and author of experimental novel Red (Collective Presse, 2013). Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Narrative Magazine, Columbia Review, among others. She has work forthcoming in The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics from Black Ocean Press (ed. Andrew Ridker Black Ocean 2014). Her work has been featured in Time Out New York, GalleyCat, Flavorwire’s 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry, and others. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York and was awarded a Kundiman fellowship for poetry. She blogs at http://www.thisisEJKoh.com.

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Christopher Pruitt https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Christopher Pruitt2014-05-28 23:21:292019-05-19 12:09:00Death; Jebu Island, and also Rain

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Genre Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published every Friday.

Today’s course:

Peace, Love, and a lot of Loud Rock & Roll

June 17, 2022/in A Transfer, Blog / Sunee Lyn Foley
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Crosses to Pentacles

June 10, 2022/in A Transfer, Blog / Jazmine Cooper
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Table to Trash

June 3, 2022/in A Transfer, Blog / Franz Franta
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Midnight Snack

A destination for all your late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

QVC-land

May 6, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / D. E. Hardy
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Escape Artists at the End of the World

April 29, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / Lisa Levy
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The House in the Middle

April 15, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
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More coming soon!

Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every Monday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Eggs, No Basket

June 27, 2022/in A Transfer, Amuse-Bouche, CNF / Kelsi Long
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The Revolution Began at Book Club

June 20, 2022/in A Transfer, Amuse-Bouche, Fiction / Sari Fordham
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A Letter to the Dead Grandmothers That Raised Us

June 13, 2022/in A Transfer, Amuse-Bouche, Poetry / Levi J. Mericle
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The variety in this issue speaks not only to the eclectic world we inhabit but to the power of the human spirit. We live in an uncertain world. In the U.S., we’re seeing mass shootings daily. Across the world, we’re still very much in a pandemic, some being trapped in their homes for weeks on end, others struggling to stay alive in hospitals. War continues to wage in Ukraine. Iran and North Korea are working diligently to make nuclear weapons. The list goes on. Still, we have artists who are willing and able to be vulnerable with one another, to share stories and art to help us try and make sense of our world.

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