Enough to Say It's Far: Selected Poems of Pak Chaesam (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) (English and Korean Edition) - Softcover

Pak, Chaesam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691124469 ISBN 13: 9780691124469

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2006

Synopsis

This is the first English translation of selected poems by one of the most important and unusual modern poets of South Korea. In contrast to the strident political protests found in the poetry of many of his contemporaries, Pak Chaesam's work is characterized by intimate portraits of place, nature, childhood, and human relationships, and by indirection, nostalgia, and reflectiveness.


Often focused upon the border of this world and some other, Pak writes with a spareness of presentation but a cornucopia of imagery, meticulously exploring objective and subjective realms of existence and memory. Encouraging the reader to see and listen, and to allow the sensory to reshape the analytical, Pak's poetry opens up new realms of experience. A fellow Korean poet described Pak's poetry as being "the most exquisite expression of the Korean sense of han," or melancholy.

About this title

About the Author

Pak Chaesam (1933-1997) wrote fifteen books of poetry and numerous books of essays, and he won many of South Korea's most prestigious literary prizes. David R. McCann is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard University. Jiwon Shin is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the Back Cover

"McCann and Shin have executed what seem to me a perfect set of translations. The work is all of a piece, and all very fine."--Richard Howard, series editor of the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, and author of Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003

"This translation of selected poems by one of South Korea's most respected lyric poets illuminates his work for the first time in English. These poems do not neglect to remind the reader of irrecoverable time, but insist on the mind's ability to bear the richness of what has been lost, captured in Pak's image of the persimmon, the deep orange fruit arriving late in the year. The poems have been rendered in an evocative English afterlife by the translators. Their decisions, particularly regarding words difficult to translate, prove to be astute and effective. It is a welcome work that fills a large gap in Korean poetry in English."--Ann Y. Choi, Rutgers University

Reviews

Poetry became central to the humanities curriculum at West Point partly for a practical reason: Poems are often short. With technical studies as well as military duties, the cadets had little time for works such as Middlemarch. In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound quotes a foreign student as saying poetry consists of "gists and piths." Compactness may be one strength of the art.

Aside from convenience for military cadets (or air travelers), a poem's brevity can give excitement and pleasure. Prominent examples in English are William Blake and Emily Dickinson. The poems of the Korean poet Pak Chaesam (1933-97), newly published in a translation by David R. McCann and Jiwon Shin, include a sequence called "Four-Line Poems," good-humored and delicate. Here is "Four-Line Poems 3: Place":

As you play the delightful melody,
your fingers trace between where strings are or not.
At this very moment there is no tracing
if my mind is here or not.

The minute negative space traced by the musician's fingers, a graceful code of absences and presences, provides a revealing, intricate comparison for the alternately mindful or self-forgetful state of the mind in pleasure: a dance of consciousness and unconsciousness as rapid and intricate as the movement of fingertips over frets and strings. Sharply observed, small details open out into large emotions in "After an Illness":

Spring is coming.
Like hair just untied.
Savor of garlic greens
that clean the palate.
The blood has cooled, now,
and will flow as it should.
Notice the buds, small steeples,
where the earth, sensitive as skin,
breaks just open
to a dull pain
mixed with delight.
Generous bounty makes all living things
seem like an elder brother.
Earth-rooted life,
sky-reaching to play or rest
with sunlight and wind,
great heaven and tiny earth, your
brilliant gesture that cannot be
stopped.

The steeple-buds, the living skin of soil, the unbound hair, the garlic greens: These details link the "tiny earth" of the poet's recuperation with the seasonal process of the natural world, "earth-rooted" but "sky-reaching." This kind of brevity suggests lenses for observing the details of galaxies or the mysteries of a cell. Or it can resemble the fine point of an engraver's tool, etching memory.

Baby's Foot on My Brow

Two-year-old Sang-gyu,
asleep now
after toddling perilously about
the alleyway and courtyard
all day; your pretty feet
that crossed over the huge sun
beneath their soles:
Here, just once try a step
on your father's forehead,
steeper even than the gravel road.
Such soft, undirtied feet.

By Robert Pinsky
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691124469
• ISBN 13: 9780691124469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184