57th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards Poetry Commendation Award: To Unfold a Bird

Written by Lee Su-myeong

Translated by Noh Hye-yeon

To Unfold a Bird

A bird followed by hundreds of birds. I pass through the hundred-fold bird, without disturbance. The birds are seething.

I move myself. I move a rock. The birds enter the rock, leave the rock. I move the rock against the direction of bird, while they watch

How to Fall Under the Minari Family

Every morning I wake minari. I hover as minari.

I see a function f I do not understand. In theory, I follow the rhythms of minari standing still as exception. A lump of rhythms in the shape of minari

Rhythm outside rhythm
Rhythm is no abode
Rhythm is most of me blended into it, therefore

I push myself aside
Pulled apart, blade by blade

I break into today’s minari and try to repair minari, but a machine only wants a larger machine to smash itself, rather than become the machine itself. Minari leaps into the minari family

The minari family grows smaller

And smells foul on occasion. Into the hollow leaf
Fly the great bundles of minari

I wake minari. In the mechanical arrangement, most minari are nothing beyond minari

Muddled, it looms.

I Have Your Corpse

I have your fire. Frozen fire, I blow on it softly. You do not realize fire.
The evening darkens, I walk underground embracing the city’s return. I pulled away the foot lodged in my heart, waiting for wider swarms of straw

To harm you and return you

I knock down the sky. I follow the sky. Just remember to be kind to the black stove that had crouched and to the scale that shot up pell-mell and sprouted today

To leave a song that doesn’t move
Inside your frozen mouth

I watch the hardened sun enter the bricks. As though I were the final weather, I put off the sunset and abandon the sunset.

The evening that changes you into many without changing you

I have your corpse.
Your corpse without you

Now nothing passes through you.