3 Poems
Jack Jung 정새벽
Jack Jung 정새벽 is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi aSang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.
Translator’s note
Oh Kyu-won 오규원 (1941–2007) is a major Korean poet. In his late poetry, he departed from his early focus on representing abstractions. He was driven to scour his language of abstract meanings and emotions. To do so, he attempted to write about what he called “the raw image (날이미지)” – images of dreams without rhetoric. “Fog” is from this late period. “Canna” is also from that same late period, and “I Suddenly...” is from his early period.
FOG
Following the river’s water, the fog rose.
Following the fog, the river disappeared, and from the river’s
water, having come out long ago,
the stones, even they, disappeared following the fog.
Past the field of stones, past the meadow, toward the bank
the fog rose and erased the horseweeds,
and erased my lower body.
And my body without its lower half
floated in the empty air.
With my two hands, already erased, I
tapped on my erased half.
Invisible on the earth, a being
made a tapping noise by the river’s shore.
CANNA
The day Canna first flowered
newspaper did not come
instead a dragonfly
hovered above the flower
Canna pulled on its stem
and rose higher the day
it flowered again nothing
happened and then
the next eve rain poured
down for a while.
I SUDDENLY GET THIS FEELING THAT I AM FUCKING UP MY LIFE
Nothing is easier than falling asleep, but I can’t even do that right,
and my vacant eyes are wide open
from 1 AM to 2 AM, and between
1 AM and 2 AM, slipping into a crack in my absent thoughts,
I suddenly get this feeling that I am fucking up my life,
dumping a bucket of cold water on my head.
Lost for words, I lie on my side with vacancy in my eyes,
when something cuddles my drenched body
telling me that since I’ve fucked up my life, fucking up can be my life—and so,
the night, that devil, deceives me.
