45th Translation Awards Commendation Awards: Poems by Choi Seung-ja
Written by Choi Seung-ja
The following is an excerpt from the translation by Kim Sun-kyoung.
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From the Beginning
From the beginning I was nothing:
Mold on a dried-up loaf of bread
A long history of urine stains on the wall
A thousand-year-old corpse still covered in maggots.
Sketch of translator Kim Sun-kyoung
Poetess Choi Seung-ja
No parents raised me.
Falling asleep in a rathole and eating fleas’ livers
Helplessly fading away everywhere
From the beginning I was nothing.
So don’t say you know me
When we brush past one another
Like falling meteors.
IDon’tKnowYou IDon’tKnowYou
YouYourYourself, happiness
You, your, yourself, love
That I am alive
Is just an everlasting rumor.
Bullshit Autumn
Bullshit autumn invades.
Syphilis autumn.
And death, it comes
For the dusk with one leg paralyzed.
Everything loses its moisture and
Every road edge decomposes.
The old singer’s voice etched on the record withers
Hello, is this Juk-sun? Yes, Juk-sun? Hey Juk-sun
The telephone line fails the receivers in mid air and
The lovers, once gone, never come back, even in dreams.
And then from where the waste water of memory pooled in
A room of time’s inn, reeking of horse urine
I ask in a choked voice as if waking up from death
How far have they gone, how far should they go
For the rivers to reach the sea?
Love or Murderous Intent and Self-destruction
At midnight under a dim light
The awl on the table
Glows like my skull’s murderous intent.
Gnashing its lonely teeth, murderous intent
Or love.
In the air the edge of the knife gleams;
Descending toward my neck
Yet forever still.
Cut, cut, cut off my neck.
The muffled sound of my head
Hitting the floor, wanting to hear it with
My ears on the floor and then
My eyes lying on the floor will close.
At Daehueng Temple in Haenam
―To Eun-ji’s parents
In the hope that they read this poem
As a conception dream about Eun-ji
At midnight the river runs to the sea and
Our hands feel for the hands of the beloved
The streams sleeping within us for so long
Suddenly wake and start flowing
Rains will come
Crossing the sea
Absorbing your land.
The valley with the temple
The sky’s empty glass
From there the young, intoxicated wind swelling
And now beyond the ridges
The lovers’ hands touching.
Towards You
Like a stream of water
I’ll go towards you.
Like alcohol dissolving in water
Like nicotine craving alcohol
Like caffeine embracing nicotine,
Like a syphilis pathogen flowing through the blood vessels
Like death snatching life.