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Korean Literature Now

Back to Poetry

For the Second Time in Thirty-Three Years scrap

by Choi Seung-jago link Translated by Sophie Bowmango link August 4, 2016

Author Bio 작가 소개

최승자

Choi Seung-ja

Choi Seung-ja has published eight poetry collections. The English edition of Portrait of a Suburbanite: Poems of Choi Seung-ja was published in 2015 as part of the Cornell University East Asia Series. She has translated the works of Paul Auster, David Fontana, Max Picard, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Richard Brautigan, May Sarton, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

For the second time in thirty-three years
I resolve to escape from myself.
First I detach my head
place it on a shelf.
Take off my arms and feet
put them on my desk and
detach my torso, seat it on a chair.
Using only my creaky knees, I steal away furtively
and start a desperate run.
I run on and on and run some more
when I can run no longer
when I want to be still, to rest
someone walks ahead of me.
I run to them seeking pity.
Let me rest in your arms awhile,
and, if only I could,
softly, as air escapes a balloon
softly, let me die in those arms.
They walk off pretending not to hear.
I beg them again for pity and
at last, reluctant, as though it’s bothersome
when they turn to look back at me

There it is......
my own crumpled face.

 

Translated by Sophie Bowman

 

Writer 필자 소개

Choi Seung-ja

Choi Seung-ja

Choi Seung-ja (Hangul 최승자; born 1952) is a South Korean poet. She studied German language and literature at Korea University. She made her literary debut in 1979 when “Love of This Age” (이 시대의 사랑) and four other poems were published in the journal Literature and Intelligence. Her poetry expresses the melancholy of a person facing death. Some critics have described her work as “the moans of pain by someone who has not been loved” (Kim Hyeon) or as "perceiving a world full of lives that have lost their roots . . . and accepting that the loss of one’s roots is a human condition” (Jeong Gwa-ri). Another critic has noted that her poems are “driven by a solitary ego that shuts itself away from a world poisoned by capitalism and resists that world through the language of defiance” (Lee Gwang-ho).

Translator 번역가 소개

Sophie Bowman

Sophie Bowman

Sophie Bowman is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She has an MA in Korean literature from Ewha Womans University and won the 2015 Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Grand Prize for Poetry. Her translations have appeared in Guernica, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Koreana.

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