Achat1999, CC BY-SA 4.0, through Wikimedia Commons.
For our sequence Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve revealed in our pages. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Individual Strolling Backward,” translated by Cindy Juyoung Okay, seems in our new Summer time concern, no. 248. Right here, we requested Kim and Alright to replicate on their work.
1. Kim Hyesoon
How did this poem begin for you? Was it with a picture, an concept, a phrase, or one thing else?
This poem started throughout an interview. The poet who got here to interview me requested, “What do you consider Korean poetry today?” I answered, “I believe Korean poetry today is sort of a canine operating on the freeway.” There’s a canine inside my poem. This canine residing in “Individual Strolling Backward” is eternally digging by means of the “pile of rubbish” of the current. The poem is a poem about time, two sorts of time. Steady time and frozen time. The canine’s time and my life’s time. The poem’s time and my time. Dying’s time and residing’s time. Every is the potential for being to at least one one other.
How did writing the primary draft really feel to you? Did it come simply, or was it troublesome to write down? Are there laborious and straightforward poems?
On the time of this poem’s writing within the early eighties, South Korea was underneath the rule of a dictator. They elected the president amongst themselves within the gymnasium [translator’s note: “gym elections” refer to a farcical official process of internal selection that supported two authoritarian regimes]. I felt like day-after-day was a day when the solar didn’t rise. In that interval, I’d write poems with out modifying them. I merely referred to as the screams that burst out of me poetry. In our nation, literary magazines and newspapers ask poets to write down poems, moderately than poets submitting poems with out being commissioned—solely writers hoping to make literary debuts submit their work themselves. Throughout this time, I wrote poems solely upon request. I didn’t write anything. I sealed the bottle caps of the poems that had been springing out of me as a result of I used to be despairing over the helplessness of poetry. However in progressively releasing my thoughts from the dictatorship, I started to write down and even revise poems alone once more. I don’t know if there could be a distinction between troublesome and straightforward poems. Possibly there could be poems written with out ache.
How did you provide you with the title for this poem?
After I was scripting this poem, I considered this earth we dwell on as “the hell of that star,” and I nonetheless do. If this earth just isn’t a jail or hell buried underneath numerous stars, how is it that people can damage, kill, and devour different people? How is it that people lengthy for others, ache, and undergo? How is it that one can sit in a single’s room and watch dictatorships and wars with peace of coronary heart? The poems I wrote round this time had titles that had been all about strolling backward, wanting on the world the wrong way up, reversing meanings.
When do you know this poem was completed? Have been you proper about that? Is it completed, in spite of everything?
Can you utilize the phrase completed a couple of poem? There isn’t a “end” for a poem. A poem is open and unfinished to the final line. I put a poem that’s not completed in a poetry assortment. Then, in one other poem, in a special guide of poems, I begin writing once more towards the “end” of the sooner poem. As a result of the poem is rarely completed, it simply opens the door and goes out.
2. Cindy Juyoung Okay
How would you describe the interpretation course of?
I was requested to assist handle performs and, as a favor to associates, I’d management the sunshine board or make the rehearsal schedules whereas observing, over time, the dynamics of the manufacturing. I discovered it profound how there have been at all times a number of true facilities: the present belonged to so many, with out contradiction. A translator additionally works with the author: not in a fifty-fifty or ten-ninety mannequin however, just like the playwright and the actor, or the director and the choreographer, in a relationship of 100–100. When a scene had gone effectively or poorly, there was by no means only one cause, by no means one individual to fault or credit score. Writing and translating are equally corresponding, raveled processes.
Did you present your drafts to different writers or associates or confidants? In that case, what did they are saying?
I confirmed drafts of this translation to 2 individuals. My minute questions had been whether or not “right here and there” or “this manner and that” higher match the poem’s world, and the sonic results of “footprints left within the sand” versus “footprints within the sand.” I additionally mentioned the poem’s construction with the Evaluation’s poetry editor. It was fortunate—and sadly uncommon—to have the ability to change 1000’s of phrases about the place to carry and launch x.
What was the problem of this explicit translation?
This poem is imaginative, however nothing about it’s a joke. So the intense stakes couldn’t be overcast by associations of the canine with fable or satire.
Do you remorse any revisions?
My revisions had been willful efforts to attenuate future remorse so fortunately, no. I additionally perceive my translation as a contribution to the poem’s life, not some definitive decision—a starting, an invite, not a termination.
Kim Hyesoon is the creator of fourteen poetry collections. The Hell of that Star will likely be revealed by Wesleyan College Press in 2026.
Cindy Juyoung Okay is a translator and the creator of the poetry assortment Ward Towards.
