“Easily Written Poem” is assumed to be the last poem Yun Dong-ju wrote. For my translation, I introduced new punctuations that created a mixture of short and long sentences, which are not present in the Korean original. In his original, Yun Dong-ju played out the drama of shifting senses of hope and shame with a mixture of pauses and delays that he brought out from Korean language’s idiosyncrasies. Without those sonic shifts to attend to the speaker’s transforming thoughts and feelings, the poem fell flat in my earlier attempts at its English translation. With the mixture of long and shorts sentences, as well as different line breaks, my aim was to revive Yun Dong-ju’s mercurial dirge for his future.Jack Jung on "Easily Written Poem" |
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The Long View of Louise Glück
"Even though she had been garlanded with literary awards in the US and faithfully published by Carcanet in Britain, she is a poet who never seeks attention. To read her is to encounter stillness and slow time. There is a bare-branched, midwinter feeling to her writing, a leaflessness that has its own beauty."
via THE GUARDIAN |
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| "She finely accumulates detail in her descriptions, absorbing the tensions of her own human awareness of nature, and the notions of animal consciousness and even the absence of consciousness. She manages to remain both reverent and witty; in the same poem, she interjects, 'Do you still love poetry?'" |
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