Translation Awards Grand Prize Winner in Poetry - Solace
Poems written by Ham Min-bok
Following is an excerpt from the translation by Charse Yun
Persimmon Tree
You look so old.
On your way to heaven, so why so many thoughts?
Not one branch able to stretch out straight, free from care.
Stuttering, twisting,
your entire body blisters from your fierce contemplation of the sun.
From the outset, the fruit firm.
A puckery taste.
Determined not to convey
any unripened thought.
You spitefully drop the flower, the unripe persimmon,
refuse to utter absurd talk to the passing wind.
No, this branch won’t do, so you snap it off.
You govern the branches firmly.
Not even light-souled birds can nest here;
they sit and preen their feathers, learn to shake off
any lingering attachment.
Look:
The red fruit in your autumn hair--
How can such lovely fruit dangle from your gnarled body?
And then it’s over.
When the winter wind blows, you return to your nakedness.
As if dead, you refuse to speak, and cloister yourself
like a monk entering his long winter retreat.
Pumpkin
When I placed a pumpkin by my pillow and gazed at it
my heart glowed despite the chill of the room.
The pumpkin did its utmost to achieve such a firm tautness.
Riddled on the inside with seeds,
it never snapped a single family photograph.
The bees sawing the air in its pumpkin village,
the sound of rain spilling outside.
At night, squeezing the pumpkin tightly to my chest,
I could feel its vines wander throughout the room,
the bristle of its elephant ear-leaves,
pumpkin progeny within.
In the meantime, it became a village.
Spring comes, and it has started to rot _
a spume of white downy mildew.
It again did its utmost, but collapsed into wet pulp.
The rain falls; the pumpkin so misses the scent of the damp soil, it can’t bear it.
Because of the fragrance of decay, it opens the door and steps outside.
There! Now it’s going places.
Webfoot Octopi
Standing at the gunwale, pulling in the line that we’d cast out
tied with empty conch shells
.
This is not fishing by deception with bait
or a net blocking off an escape path,
but luring them with ‘homes’ where they can hatch their eggs.
Webfoot octopi come up, one after the other,
and with the suckers on their tentacles coiling up toward their heads,
they were busy making a front door
out of flat stone, conch shells, wood...
There were those that couldn’t finish the front door
because the bottom of the ocean floor was mud _
some came up and fell out of their shells.
“What? Two of ‘em inside!”
The first octopus had made the front door so perfectly
that the door had become a wall.
A double front door.
Now a double death!
Standing at the gunwale and pulling in the line of tied conch shells,
the boat buckles.
And the homes tied to the line buckle.
Descendant of Fishermen, Ham Hyeon-su
Hyeon-su, my brother, write a poem about catching fish.
A story about riding the combine into the thick fog and catching some mullet.
Isn’t that an interesting story? Didn’t I give you a ride that one time?
But that’s beside the point. We’re in serious trouble.
Our nets are empty of fish.
In the slow tidal season, our catch is sucked dry each year, just like
that fisherman’s rail-thin dog. When the peach flowers blossom,
the mullet are in season: that’s when they taste the best, fetch the best price,
and we can package them up for sale...
Father used to catch so many mullet back in the day
that he’d hire workers who carried
them on A-frames back and forth all night. Whether it was high tide,
or the water receded and the nets floated up,
they’d catch a huge amount of mullet, as if carpeting the floor.
They loaded up an A-frame with as much fish as a man could still lift and carry.
When they set out, the going got tough, so they’d rest, first throwing out
the ones that didn’t look fresh and had lost their scales
And if it was still rough going they stopped to sip some water.
They kept the best mullet but the other kind of mullet, you know the other kind, don’t you?
They threw those out, but even still, if it was too heavy they’d stop,
set the A-frames standing in the mud,
start throwing away the dying ones and carry the
ones still fresh, flapping; and after walking 10 li through the mud,
bodies drenched with sweat, they stood at the end of the tip of the mud flat that jutted out.
They pulled out cigarettes, looking back at the distance they’d just walked,
sorry that they couldn’t carry more.
Ten li through the mud was a slog, wasn’t it? Even though it was hard,
I wish I could’ve harvested mullet, too.
Dear Hyeon-su, a story about heading in on a combine
and loading up fish is partly a story about Yeocheolli Village mud flat.
But the mud drying out is such a sad story. You can’t write about it carelessly.
Father’s story is just a poem. Why, all you have to do is stick
a title to it. Why not call it “Life”?
Hyeon-su, my brother, please. Have a drink...
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Charse Yun is a Korean-American who has been living and teaching in Seoul for the past 13 years. He currently teaches at the Department of Practical English at Korea National Open University (KNOU) and Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at Ewha Womans University.
He began translating Korean literature into English "accidentally and incidentally."
"I have always loved English literature. I was also interested in the Korean language. The two seemed to come together inevitably since I was interested in both areas," Yun said.
Yun translated poet Ham Min-bok's works for this year's contest and he said encountering with Ham's poems were also unplanned.
"Again, accidentally (or unplanned). About nine years ago, a Korean literature professor at KNOU gave me a book of Ham's poems as a thank-you gift for helping her edit an abstract in English. I was intrigued by the gift and tried to understand its contents over the years," Yun said.
He thinks "anything rendered so beautifully that it makes you wish you could read it in the original" is a good translation.