My
friend and one-time student Daniel Parker has sent me a translation he and his
wife, YoungShil Ji, did of Jin Eun-young’s We,
Day by Day (2018). It’s volume 25 in The White Pine Press Korean Voices
Series.
This
book was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk prize in translation in 2019. The
judges wrote that “YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker have created a wonderfully
supple, lasting music through their translation.” As Ji and Parker suggest in
the Introduction, we have to find a new way to read these poems, quieting our
rage for understanding as we go. There are progressions of images in the poems,
and sometimes images—a wounded forehead, glass petals and glass flowers, the
nipple of a balloon—carry over from one poem to the next. I wonder, too, with
her, why “Washed clothes take so long to dry,” and about the shoe seller’s
fixations with time—drunken time, a Big Ben clock, the cuckoo’s funny cries,
and the wristwatch memory never wore. Eun-young drops a delightful color into
nearly every stanza of her poems. She’s not merely a visual imagist poet,
though; these poems are full of sounds, textures, tastes, and fragrances as
well. And more than once an image as from a surrealist painting surprises:
“birds soar through the hole pierced in my back” (“Before the Rooster Crows”).
Some of
these techniques may be from the surrealists’ playbook, such as the incongruous
image: “the moon’s eyelashes are long.” But others are definitely not, as when
she reverses time, playing the tape backward: “Like the smell of blood from a
temple firing into the round muzzle of a black pistol” in “A Muffler Named
Vladimir.”
“A Day
When I’m Sick and Alone” reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s attempt to capture in
an essay the feeling of illness approaching delirium, in “On Being Ill.”
Eun-young makes fun of the
critic’s attention to unimportant details in “To a Critic,” and suggests the
critic’s pronouncements might be less than respectable: “Be sure to feel the
whoosh of something whooshing through the crotch of your thin pants.” She makes
a note to herself in “To Me”:
Burn
the hardback book.
predict
something,
love
contingency.
The epigraphs she gleans from her readings in philosophy—Nietzsche,
Spinoza, and Descartes—are also like notes to herself, especially the one by
Spinoza about being careful not to mock or execrate what is, after all, merely
human. And to love the human is also to love contingency. And in “Friend,” she
revises Descartes’ first principle so that the presence of a friend, rather
than doubt, assures us of our existence. Eun-young has a Ph.D. in philosophy,
so these are not a dilettante’s interests.
The
conceit of one poem is a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein, written by Rainer Maria
Rilke and found in Rodin’s studio. The writer scornfully rejects the offer of a
grant from Wittgenstein’s foundation because it’s too small. While other poets
may be content to write ekphrastic poems describing a painting, Eun-young’s “Painting”
is a regular mashup of the arts, as the people in two competing paintings read
or recite Neruda and Eliot while playing the cello well and the piano badly.
I don’t
want to suggest all these poems are light or funny. They are not, and some
evoke the lost innocence of childhood, the death of immigrants as they attempt
to find a better life, and the futility of contemporary poets ever developing
the power of Goethe’s Werther, that
drove readers to suicide.
These
poems cannot have been easy to translate. But Parker and Ji give a sense of
sureness to the images and turns of Eun-young’s lines. We are startled, we
wince, we laugh, and we marvel as she surely must have intended.
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