Jeong Ho-seung's poem (16)

Riding the Waves

Translated by Brother Anthony and Susan Hwang

As the snowy winter’s night grows deeper they advance, walking over the waves in the snow.

The more they fall, the more they hurl themselves at the waves; the further they sink down, the further they rise up as snowmen, and so those people who had been weeping for this world in the winter’s night, dragged off again to some place in this world, make their way through the stiffened waves.

Lying on the sea like straw sandals crossing distant hills, lying like vegetables on waves about to overflow, they advance, awaiting spring snow, the more sorrowful they grow.

Last autumn wild chrysanthemums, too, hurled themselves at the sea glimpsed between the trees in hawthorn groves, while the one who was to take a knife and slash at the waves has fallen.

To arrive at true humanity just once, the longer we live, the more we ride the waves amidst falling snow; the more agonized we are, the more we ride the overflowing waves in solitude.

Above the sea where snow like Mother’s fingernails falls are our feet, surging up then vanishing, our lives, vanishing then surging up.

This poem is rather more challenging than many of Jeong’s poems. The reader is asked to imagine a dreamlike scene of stiffened waves, of beings and even flowers throwing themselves at the sea’s waves. The key to the poem stands near the end like a kind of riddle, in the words “to arrive at true humanity.” What is our goal in life, despite all the confusion and disappointment, if not that?