Grand prize in poetry

Author Jin Eun-young

Grand Prize in poetry

Jin Eun-young's poems translated by Sophie Bowman

Sophie Bowman is a translator and masters student of Korean literature at Ewha Womans University. She has attended the regular course, special course and translation atelier at the translation academy of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Bowman translated an anthology of poetry by poets with disabilities titled “Let Me Linger as a Flower in Your Heart” last year. She is a recipient of the International Communication Foundation Korean literature translation fellowship and is currently translating a collection of three novellas by Jon Kyong-nin including “The Goat Herding Woman.”

When You Were a Boy

You liked the imprisoned maiden and small windows and spinning tops.

False names of various colours, apple vinegar

and rafts that fell apart at songs with even just a tinge of sadness.

Running down wooden stairs with your eyes closed

the sheer beauty of that creaking sound.

You hated the baddies, the oil wars and explaining yourself.

The ice star trembled above your yellow lambswool blanket.

Old coins rang out like drops of water

as they tumbled on a broken fountain.

When you were a boy

back then when you wanted to eat plums you'd picked yourself

when there were no breasts, heavy as stone, beneath your black drip pattern dress.

When girls loved girls

when boys loved boys

between thumb and forefinger

when you were grasping a strange firecracker,

when you burned all the huge parentheses of yellowing exam papers,

when you wanted to become the painter of a red house,

when you layered up burning underclothes

on the cold skin of war and passing summer.

All of This

It’s as if a soap bubble will expand boundlessly with transparent joy.

As if I’ll be able to take you away to a city with a rose-hued palace.

In the space between winter and evening,

it seems I’ll never be able to forget that dizzying kiss fringed in chestnut-brown.

Like I’ll be able to conceal everything with the vast velvet of love.

As though all of this is just a lie.

While a hungry seagull sucks violently on the dry teat of the sky,

it’s as if a white bite mark is soaring above the water.

This city is like a child writing out the same sentence over and over eternally.

A shack falls out like a first tooth and is tossed above the red moon.

A liquor bottle blotched with blood and soot rolls this way down a white slope.

It seems I’ll have to put the one abiding line of my first anthology into my last as well.

My youth? Well… it seems to have upped and left already.

It’s as though a soft yellow wing, with thousands of grey bells hung from it

is slowly ascending.

As though gold is sticking its hand down the throat of a poor child and making them throw up everything.

Stars roll in the watery green-tinged vomit,

God seems like a car crash victim feigning injury.

It seems that he hasn’t taken the medicine prescribed him by the angels even once.

It’s as if the green capsules have split and the grains within are spilling out.

Annyeong, annyeong, snow falls above the shattered grey of a slate roof.

It seems that everything I ever saw must have been a lie.

As if shreds of the torn wings of silver bats hanging from the moon are cascading.

Beautiful

If today you are beautiful

it is like the glittering hairpin in the still-growing tresses of a dead girl,

like a picture that captivates the gaze of someone who cannot see,

like the children in muslin pyjamas

wandering past in the mist intoxicated by the scent of cherries,

like the salty taste of the long necked giraffe living in the rainy season savannah,

melting in increments seeping across red cloth

to desiccated white grains

scattered over sandy gills.

Today

if you are beautiful

it’s like the empty chimney of seaweed stench rising up

from the green fog draped above a landfill site.

That Day

The day I first brushed the lips of poetry,

the day I rained down like a star,

the day I walked in the dazzling yet dark light

sweeping up strands of hair.

The day I first saw a lizard

I toddled hurriedly to catch hold of its green tail,

the day my first white tooth came through and I smiled,

the day I stretched out my arms and spun round and round

in a whirlwind of warm sand.

The day I ran into the road,

the day I scattered hundreds of sheets of paper high into the sky,

you gazed at me from behind the blue stripes

of the vertically tumbling curtain.

The day you disappeared, leaving only a green tail in my hands.

Who was striking an empty can in the summer yard?

Who had bright white elbows sticking out from beneath their short sleeves?

Who was it that called out

it's me, it's me

from behind the thick wall?

The day you left,

I turned over the run-through hourglass.

The Love of a Poet

If by some chance you were my lover

how lucky you would be.

If you were my lover

I would write you poetry.

You would arrive home

and wash your feet, and then

when you’d fall asleep with head and toes touching the cold parallel walls,

when you’d fall asleep covered with a damp blanket,

I would send a vast fortress ablaze with love into your dreams.

I'd give you the tender breeze that sways the armpits of branches in the May apple-blossom orchard,

the soft hammer of chocolate and peppermint, post boxes and trains

and a country road you’ve never seen before.

A freshly opened wine bottle and fluttering white wings

and the eternal picnic of a body,

I'd write you a line of poetry filled with all those moments, all those things.

I would give you a poem that makes the flow of life feel just like drinking a cup of tea.

If you were my lover, ah!

How lucky you would be.

Because of her, that your heart became the biggest empty house in the world,

nights when black candlewax drips onto your tongue,

poems like night-time dandelion seeds flying off to unknowable places,

there would be no need for you to write like that.

My Beautiful Launderette

To grandma,

who would climb up to the second floor banister and lean out, yelling about having been abandoned

having bought her a bottle of clear alcohol and delivered it

whilst I fled dodging her curses she would call out to me with a caged crow’s cry.

To my grandma,

who would pelt down swearwords that fluttered

like the blue nappies on a windy day hung out to dry on the close rooftops of the alleyways,

while I ran hand in hand with the kid next door, escaping through the backstreets.

Even if I ran as far as I could without looking back

she would shriek like a cracked golden horn,

"Look here! Is that girl your secret lover or what?"

like a maestro of nostalgic French literature, who brought out such Proustian words and the awakening of my inner man,

"I really might be in love with her"

remembering the soft hand I held on that street corner.

To me,

when you cried in front of me, saying that you were going to marry a young, penniless, inane, would-be songwriter

and I yelled even more than mum or dad in opposition,

To my little sister,

who treasured the tattered pages

of the American book of short stories I handed down to her once I was done reading it,

"You’re the world’s biggest snob, if you were going to be like this why did you give me your copy of

The Gift of the Meji

?"

"It might be OK for me, but not for you"

the words I couldn’t say prick my forefinger like a large safety pin left unhooked a long time ago in the pocket of my orange baseball jacket.

Having completed a PhD thesis on the precise logic of emptiness with great maturity

the thing that I remember now

is the stain on cotton cloth that the Ven. Yongsoo spoke of

that stain like some sort of… splotch

seeing as the poet Kim Yi Deum said,

Is that stain shaped like a star, or what?,

To all of those who are simply curious about its shape and colour,

allow me to show you my beautiful launderette.

To my first boyfriend,

who smiled with ridicule or perhaps jealousy, when I took him back to mine for the first time in a decade and he said,

Wow, you’re still living like a student

,

Even if you’ve no spite you’re a nasty man, living in a new-city apartment with a woman who has docile-looking lips

then again, that foolishness of yours was what I loved. The cloud-like dreams of Bachelard that flowed in my room summoned from your mouth,

That mountainside neighborhood office in Haengdang-dong, where I worked for six months as a level-9 civil servant after graduating from the girls’ high school,

now transformed into a huge apartment complex, I can never return to that winding maze,

but the emaciated alleyways, the spiders, will have died alone calling the names of all the gods in the world,

To my father,

counting hypothetically, "If you hadn’t quit that job you would have been way up the payscale by now," as though, after all this time, working out the age of a baby that died in the womb,

nagging me unfalteringly like a child,

How great can it really be? Quit this clowning around as a poet and earn some money, then we can all move to Bundang,

Allow me to show you this launderette.

If you bury your face in between the mass of hanging clothes and enter, where not a single expression of mystery is visible

neither your clothes nor mine

these confessions cannot be put on and taken out, they are hung from up high in this place alone, let me show you.

My innate filth which you

the masters of sanitary science love with arms outstretched,

The searing ironing where the neater you press the more often your skin gets scorched and stuck

in a shabby ledger,

In Search of Lost Time

, that American book of short stories,

Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way

, old citations

water and dreams and the like are all that is written.

Hello there, all you clothes,

hurry off and find the people who left you here. In the midsummer of my lifetime when poultry farm hens kindle their deep yellow eggs,

all of them, reeking of bleach took only the secretly white flowers like dried-up riverside forsythias

and moved out with merely their bodies in tow.

Born in the 70s

We say we write with our lives on the line

but for us

there is no one aiming a gun.

It's a tragedy.

As the world turns like a pink hoola-hoop at our waists

we eat meals

and get drunk

always waiting.

In the end

we shot each other.

Stealing Away Song

Give me everything in your pockets now, then

I will love you, you poor girl.

Heave out your sinking legs

from the mire of the heart's quicksand.

Good grief! Such tiny legs

place them atop the translucent shoes of silent waters.

The things in your pockets, that purple-tinged green pouch, give it to me

then I will love you.

We're like the white body of a plum tree, shaking

in the dexterous fingers of spring.

Erase the small space

that we two stayed up all night making,

turn the machine of love as if to wear it out

and like a housemaid paid only two handfuls of sadness,

give me everything in your pockets now, then

I will love you, my poor woman.

Despair, like river water that sweeps up rubbish along its way,

you and I, will take with us a few of the fallen,

and disappear like the meagre sums of a gambling den.

Give me everything in your pockets, then

falling on the napes of the piously long necks of women

heads bowed following the first funeral procession of the new year,

like those white lips of snow,

then, we were alive.

Useless Stories

Paper

pen

questions

useless divinity

useless shame

green cherries

the white sail of a big ship in a framed picture

when the wind blows

feelings for you

sunshine warming the windows of an empty house

benevolent machines

the thorns in a tunnel of insanely fragrant roses

by a grave that no one comes to visit

a parchment book

that no one ever opens

newspaper articles on the factory girls' strike

night and day

two different nights

kisses when you’re fast asleep

Das Kapital

rain falling on a forest of dead juniper trees

your ears

Aeroplane Bound for the Moon

What kind of propeller will I have to fix to this song?

Am I twenty years old, or ten?

The moon is calling,

baby, baby my baby.

What kind of propeller will I have to fix to my aeroplane?

The plane flying up to the moon

that shines like the glint in mother’s eyes

I want big, sturdy wings

I want a propeller so noisy it could burst your eardrums.

The clamorous aeroplane I drew

flies up towards the shining moon I drew.

The world in the picture is beautiful

I peek inside.

The moon in the picture is like a jaundiced man’s pupils.

Fixed to the plane in the picture are white petals just like a propeller.

At my deep sigh the wind blows inside the picture.

The propeller headed to the moon flies away one petal at a time.

I raise my head having been crying, that aeroplane bound for the moon,

the moon with its long shadow hand

pats it lightly.

Draw again tomorrow