by Pak Chaesam
Enough to Say It’s Far
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The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation l
Editorial Advisor: Richard Howard
for other titles in the lockert library, see page 151
Enough to Say It’s Far
S E L E C T E D
P O E M S O F
P A K C H A E S A M
Translated by
David R. McCann and Jiwon Shin
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p r i n c e t o n u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s p r i n c e t o n a n d o x f o r d
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pak, Chae-sam.
[Poems. English & Korean Selections]
Enough to say it’s far : selected poems of Pak Chaesam / translated by David R.
McCann and Jiwon Shin.
p.
cm. — (Lockert library of poetry in translation) Poems in both English and Korean.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12445-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12445-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12446-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12446-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. McCann, David R. (David Richard), 1944–
II. Shin, Jiwon, 1969–
III. Title. IV. Series
PL992.62.C4A26
2006
895.714—dc22
2005054515
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Publication of this book has been supported by the Sunshik Min Endowment for the Advancement of Korean Literature, Korea Institute, Harvard University This book has been composed in Sabon with Origami Display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation is supported by a bequest from Charles Lacy Lockert (1888–1974)
C o n t e n t s
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Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction
xiii
Soaring Dragon Waterfall
3
Han
5
Sound of the Taffy Seller’s Shears
7
Landscape
9
Thousand-Year Wind
11
From the Song of a Celebrated Singer
13
A Path of a Heavenly Maiden
15
Autumn River in Burning Tears
17
Some Day, Some Month
19
As Summer Goes and Autumn Comes
21
Landscape Painter
23
Enough to Say It’s Far
25
In the Wind
27
v
C o n t e n t s
Waking Alone at Dawn
29
Spring’s Pathway
31
News from Home
33
Immortals’ Paduk Game
35
Untitled
37
Night at Tonghak Temple
39
Seeing the Ferry
41
My First Love
43
In an Empty Courtyard
45
Nothing
47
Seeing the Fresh Green
49
The Feeling of the Gingko
51
Recollection 13
53
Spring Path
55
The Road Back
57
New Arirang
59
Looking at Winter Trees
61
vi
C o n t e n t s
Spring Riverside
63
By the Night Sea
65
Having a Drink
67
Poplar
69
Friend, You Have Gone
71
My Poem
73
At the River
75
Recollection 18
77
Recollection 29
79
I Know the Heart of the Wildgoose
81
Without Title
83
On a Rainy Day
85
Tree
87
Autumn Sea
89
Flowers on a Dead Tree
91
Song of Death
93
Diary in Summer Heat
95
vii
C o n t e n t s
Flowers May Bloom
97
Four-Line Poems
99
1 Brightness
99
2 With One Head
101
3 Place
103
4 A Song
105
Baby’s Foot on My Brow
107
Asking Not Understanding
109
What You Sent Me
111
P’iri Hole
113
Days and Months
115
Parenthetical
117
Before the Wind
119
What I Learned from the Sea
121
Looking at the Sunlight
123
Shimmering
125
Small Song
127
Stars
129
viii
C o n t e n t s
By the Mountain
131
As for Love
133
After an Illness
135
Going to the Mountain
137
Place Where I Look at Islands
139
Recollection 16
141
Autumn Coming
143
A Night When Sleep Is Far
145
Translators’ Epilogue
147
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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s l
Our thanks to Kim Cheong Lip, Mrs. Pak Chaesam, for permission to publish the original poems. The Daesan Foundation generously supported the translation project. The publication of the collection was supported by the Sunshik Min Fund, at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. Special thanks to Young-Jun Lee and Hyun-Joo Yoon for their help with the prepara-tion of the manuscript.
We wish to acknowledge Columbia University Press for permission to include nine poems by Pak Chaesam from The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, edited by David R. McCann, originally published in 2004.
xi
I N T R O D U C T I O N
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Pak Chaesam was something of a literary inside-outsider. He was born in 1933, and spent the first three years of his life in Japan, until his family moved back to Korea. His health was always frail, and he had his first hypertensive outbreak at the age of thirty-five. He grew up poor and spent most of his life struggling financially, so much so that when his deteriorating health took a fatal turn, his literary colleagues raised funds to support him. He died in 1997 of complications of kidney fail-ure. Though well regarded in literary circles during his writing career, and the recipient of many of Korea’s most prestigious literary prizes, he stayed at the edges. Rather than engagement with the social and politic
al issues that drew the literary atten-tions of so many Korean writers during the 1970s and 1980s, Pak’s works seem stubbornly local in subject matter, while his language pursues a nostalgic idiom, with verb forms, for ex-ample, more hesitantly reflective, delicate, and ornate, than the assertively political diction of many of his contemporaries.
Pak spent the early years of his life near Samch’o˘np’o, a seaside town on Korea’s south coast, to which his poetic imagination frequently returns. In Pak’s poems, the sea is both the place of loss and bewildering abundance, because it swallows the sorrow of “flowing folds of the widow’s skirts” and returns it with shimmering waves. It is with the wistfulness of a boy who grew up watching grief turning into shimmering waves that Pak Chaesam builds his poems around the yearning of all xiii
I n t r o d u c t i o n lyric verse. Beneath the iridescent waves is something lost, and Pak’s poems enact the impossibility of realizing the contours of that ineffable subject. The poems begin from a place, or a point, located in the human world, a flowering branch of a tree in a courtyard, for instance, and then climb out of it into con-templation of not a vast universe, but the space that surrounds it, “Half the branches in this world, the remainder in the next.” One of the first to have noticed Pak’s poetic talent, a cel-ebrated and controversial lyric poet of South Korea, the late So˘
Cho˘ngju, once noted in Pak’s poetry “the most exquisite expression of the Korean sense of han,” a generalized cultural construct of melancholy or resigned resentment.
Pak was also active in Korean Paduk circles—the game with black and white stones more widely known in the West by its Japanese name Go. He wrote on the subject, edited and contributed to the major Korean journals, and was known even in Japan for his expertise. Those who know the game need not be reminded of its strategic indirection, its aesthetic of space rather than confrontation, both useful analogues to Pak Chaesam’s poetics of indirection. His poems do not at-tack, but meander about the subjects. The poetic meandering inexorably creates distance, which, even on a subject as inti-mate as a desire for the beloved, designates pain of separation from what the poems speak about. Rather than speech itself, his poems attend the silence that accompanies and remains after speech or other sound. The distance that silence maps between words, sounds, or lovers becomes poetry in Pak Chaesam. This poetic distance is like having a lover’s house “just over one more hill” yet just remaining there, without any at-tempt to cross over that distance with words. Thus we named xiv
I n t r o d u c t i o n this collection of translations after his poem “Enough to Say It’s Far.”
Poverty and illness were both the facts of Pak Chaesam’s life and his poetic motifs. It was as if he relied on writing to turn the dreariness of enduring the physical affliction into something as surprisingly pleasant as an afternoon in reverie while watching the pot of herbal medicine boiling in the corner of the yard. Or perhaps as in the line “illness in my body lingering, like the debt that must be repaid,” he seems to have made the physical affliction endurable by turning it into financial affliction. His poverty was legendary. His father was a day laborer. His mother gathered sea squirts and sold them at the markets in Samch’o˘np’o. His un-cles, fishermen, sailed to the sea and some of them never returned, leaving the aunts who followed their men by throwing themselves into the sea. His brother worked as an errand boy at a local inn, and Pak grew up chewing on the leftover food that his brother brought home from time to time. He had to delay attend-ing middle school because the family couldn’t afford the fee of a mere three thousand w o ˘n, the equivalent of less than three dol-lars now. Poverty, too, aches like a child’s dream of “gathering up money after a day when I had gathered gingko leaves.” But in Pak’s poems, poverty is never sociological, neither a disabling de-ficiency nor social or political cause: instead, it enables lyric. It wasn’t as if his poems were meant to embellish poverty. He knew too well that poems cannot do such a thing; they only modestly lessen the pain and humiliation of being poor. He wrote in the preface to his last collection of poems published in 1994: I feel that it has been in vain, this path I’ve chosen: no matter how hard one tries, in the end it doesn’t work out. Even so, I xv
I n t r o d u c t i o n couldn’t help but “retie the bootlaces as if starting upon something new.” I just wish, in the end, it might add something to my wretched pocket. What more can I say?
Poetic fulfillment cannot be tallied; only the money that it sometimes brings can be reckoned. Surely we can count the number of publications. He wrote poems all through his adult life; they amount to fifteen published books of poems. Among his other publications are numerous books of prose essays, many of which, he would have admitted, he wrote in order to make ends meet. But in his case, the sheer number of books under his name seems deceptive in light of the destitution and iso-lation he endured, especially during the final years of his life.
One of his admirers, who had a chance to interview him only weeks before his passing, and wrote an article about the interview, lamented the heartlessness of the literary world that would let its most faithful child suffer in neglect.
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In his position at the edges of the literary world, in the delicate precision of the diction, and in his characteristic turn toward a liminal space between the present world and some other in his poetry, Pak was quite unlike some of his better publicized contemporaries in late twentieth-century Korea who wrote about violence and wrath in postcolonial and postwar Korea. That he kept a distance from subjects concerning the war is particu-larly surprising given the fact that he debuted in 1953, the year of the signing of the armistice of the Korean War, which sealed the border between North and South. There is no war-torn landscape in Pak’s poems; just the silent hunger of a child in a xvi
I n t r o d u c t i o n breezy seaside town where even the winds merely pass by. Five out of his fifteen books of poems were published in the 1970s, the period of the authoritarian Park Chung Hee regime, the emerging labor movement, popular outcries for democracy, and general political turmoil, when a great number of his colleagues were writing protest poems and being thrown in jail.
Other Korean poets have become known outside of Korea, in some part because of the more apparent connections between their poetry and either political themes having appeal to non-Korean readers, or thematic or gestural elements that manage to survive the translation process. With Pak’s poetry, we feel that a riskier project has been undertaken. We are both grate-ful and slightly abashed at the Lockert Library’s interest in this unusual, elusive, and yet ultimately rewarding project—for us, a chance to work together on the translations while yet far apart geographically, over the course of several years; and for the reader, we trust, a chance to encounter the work of a poet unlike many others from late twentieth-century Korea, yet having artistic brethren in many places.
xvii
Enough to Say It’s Far
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E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 2
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Soaring Dragon Waterfall
By now the voice of the sky
may have become the voice of the earth;
half of So˘rak Mountain’s Piryong Falls
still is a part of the sky.
In the end, I left it with the evening sky and came back down again.
3
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 4
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Han
Something like the persimmon tree?
Ripening in the sad evening glow,
the tree where the fruits of my heart’s love ripen.
With room to spread in the next world only, still it looms behind the one I was thinking of, falling down from above her head.
It may yet become the fruit
of her overwhelming grief
that she wished to plant
in the yard of her house.
Or would she understand
if I said it was all my sorrow,
> all my hope from a previous life,
the color of that fruit?
Or did that person too
live in sorrow through this world?
That I do not know, I do not know.
5
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 6
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Sound of the Taffy Seller’s Shears
There is illness in my body lingering,
like the debt that must be repaid,
but I can deal with that.
The sudden sound of the taffy seller’s shears as they begin their new composition
scatters brilliant gems
on the grassy meadow of my mind.
If I go out into the sound of
the taffy seller’s shears,
close companion to the sunlight,
and get a little piece snipped off
just to try the taste,
will the law of nature be revealed, or
will I arrive at the mistaken notion
that I have rounded the corner
toward eternity?
7
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 8
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Landscape
The winds pass over the grassy field;
sunlight passes across the southern sea.
As two or three gulls
have risen at the end
of their indifference, a sailboat
has gone far and farther away,
as if bound for some dim and distant land.
How pitiable,
these, and these white things,
gone only so far and tiring;
and tiring, turning to come back.
For a moment the wind
finds refuge in the shadow
of the falling flower.
Beneath the wing,
or under the sail,
for a brief moment
the sunlight finds refuge.
Where do you suppose this
and the next world divide?
Winds cross the grassy fields
as sunlight passes over the southern sea.
9
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 10
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Thousand-Year Wind
The wind is still playing
its tricks of a thousand years ago.
See how it ceaselessly comes back
to the pine boughs and tickles them.
See, just see, what it still
