by Pak Chaesam
I cannot bear it.
They send me the ghosts of poplar leaves,
they send me the dizzying winds.
111
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 112
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r P’iri Hole
It appeared
the way sunlight plays
most upon leaves and the river’s surface.
Or the way moonlight has just that appearance.
In just such an idle life,
I may have become something like their distant cousin.
Serving my parents, for my brothers and sisters, a dappled pattern becomes at last
the p’iri hole sunk deep in the flesh and it sings, it sings in the drenched root of the tree, or in the river’s waters that drench the feet.
P’iri: a small reed instrument with a piercing nasal tone.
113
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 114
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Days and Months
The mountains say nothing, ever,
while the river natters along,
flowing down through the valley.
The two different branches
have found peace, and carry on
amicably, despite the differences
in their faces.
Since time began
they have managed without grumbling.
In this autumn sun,
as light shines from the high brow
of the red-leaf-colored mountain,
and the river turns and twists
its body, their sparkling roles
tell of their existence.
In the monotonous,
ferris wheel cycle of days and months,
still unable to find the secret
of constantly new beginnings,
I have at last passed my fiftieth year.
115
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 116
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Parenthetical
Flower or leaf,
however beautifully,
it blooms not long,
and dies.
Knowing their certain ruin,
still they bloom steadily away,
making their noisy hubbub.
Though it may seem feeble
or sad, all
happening within that set limit,
that it goes on so painfully,
so perilously, is a cause
of endless astonishment.
And of course man and his glory
are but foam; yet for the moment
they gleam in the great parenthetical
emptiness.
117
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 118
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Before the Wind
Last winter the wind
heedless of my wrenching grief
took my friend
and crawled down into the ground,
into the ground.
But now
with some renewed spirit
it climbs the stalks of anemone.
Happy with life,
wherever there is life
it breaks forth in jubilation.
O wind, wind:
before you, always
my way is dark, unknown.
119
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 120
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r What I Learned from the Sea
By the sea near my home,
the poplars rustle their leaves
whispering Not a dream,
and the brilliant, flowing folds
of the widow’s skirt incite
delirium. There is all this
and all that, but nothing
of such bewildering abundance
as the sea.
But the one thing I have learned
most repeatedly from watching the sea
by my home for these forty-one years
is how to take the flower scales
and burnish bright the gleaming
or swaying that remains, the trace
when a person dies.
121
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 122
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Looking at the Sunlight
Though it is the very sunlight
that floods past my waving hands,
when I turn around, shyly
it tickles the back of my neck.
On places unknown to me—
Arab lands, the regions of the equator—
it tumbles headlong, blazing,
or on the vast, snow-covered
Siberian plain, trembling cold
it covers, protecting:
This sunlight descends
evenly with the wind,
bright on the world.
But of yesterday’s fled
or tomorrow’s brilliant
sun there is no trace;
only the sensation of today’s
at this perilously empty moment.
123
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 124
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Shimmering
At twenty
I little knew
why the shimmering air cried so.
Your house was there
just over one more hill.
Holding back the strength of mine
that would pierce to the thunder’s core,
I still did not know
why it loosed its hair and wept.
I’ve no idea, none,
why today the shimmering air
has suddenly become forty
and once again in place of me
cries with rheumy eyes.
125
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 126
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Small Song
We might agree the cricket knows
nothing but its singing,
but might it seem it will crush
the moonlit shadow where it sets
its frail feet and moves about?
The sigh I let
escape me this night
has settled on my love’s shoulders,
a thousand-weight
pain of flesh, of bone.
127
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 128
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Stars
It is a bond that gleams
because it cannot ever be broken?
The distance to the stars
that slip away between my fingers:
powerless to fill it,
I cannot lament.
Death too much like fire
only to be hidden,
life too shameful
to reveal,
and the Milky Way,
opening, closing the space between.
Heart skips,
cannot hold my position;
longing for not one,
beyond reckoning;
life at night . . . I climb
the hill, tumble into a cesspool.
129
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 130
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r By the Mountain
That love with so many
turns to it; was it
happy, in the end, or sad?
It was nothing but joy,
no way to know the difference,
so glad for it in youthful prime.
Let that remain buried in the breathless leafy shade of summer. In middle life,
let the piercing hurt of it
be drenched in the weeping colors
of autumn days.
Truly the four seasons
the mountain endures
inscribe our lifetimes.
The streams it watches over
run cool in summer,
turn cold in winter,
so shall we try to say that love
gla
ddens, or does it hurt?
131
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 132
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r As for Love
Love appeared
between the blossoms
of forsythia
and then in winter’s
empty embrace,
between the bare branches
while snow fell gentle,
a hazy white that might have calmed me,
it turned its back;
only in the end
when the bees began to buzz
and it seemed about to return
for pity of me, it vanished.
133
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 134
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r After an Illness
Spring is coming.
Like hair just untied.
Savor of garlic greens
that clean the palate.
The blood has cooled, now,
and will flow as it should.
Notice the buds, small steeples,
where the earth, sensitive as skin,
breaks just open
to a dull pain
mixed with delight.
Generous bounty makes all living things
seem like an elder brother.
Earth-rooted life,
sky-reaching to play or rest
with sunlight and wind,
great heaven and tiny earth, your
brilliant gesture that cannot be
stopped.
135
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 136
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Going to the Mountain
When I go to the mountain
the scent is warm and moist
of trees and lush grasses;
a scent suffused with the smell of earth,
of something without soul or eyes or nose; scent of the valley of my existence,
where I long to say Yes, here it is!
and lay myself down;
where if I rest
my body for a little while,
my spirit, absent
while I lay at rest, will take the color
of the grasses, bright glitter on leaves,
and from my body,
overflowing the vessel of my spirit,
let flow its scent, moist, and warm.
137
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 138
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Place Where I Look at Islands
As if with brothers and sisters,
as if with cousins too,
delighting in the wind,
joyous in the sun’s light,
the young islands play quite happily.
At times they may seem to bow their heads
as if to pick up beads,
while at other times they toss their heads back and laugh out innocently.
One sister in the bunch
spreads her skirt as if to dance,
while a younger one makes as if to run,
leaping forward as he comes.
O hear me, Heavenly Father.
Let our days too
be days of rest
always such as these.
139
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 140
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Recollection 16
In the sea near P’alp’o my home,
one aunt drowned herself.
A distant aunt had drowned herself too,
and others; their precious lives they gave away.
Suicide: why choose that?
What shattered dream fragment
made them long so to end their lives?
Did the sea resemble a flower garden?
Was that the reason they all removed their shoes before they leaped?
I tried to imagine
they had forgotten the faraway,
already distant causes of their own sorrows, drenched, intoxicated as they were by that greater beauty.
But to my eyes now I have passed fifty, the sea has become a dull thing, and plain.
141
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 142
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r Autumn Coming
This summer
I shielded myself from the heat
with a thin hempen weave,
and now as autumn at last draws near
sunlight a thousand li away
touches my body just gently;
and having rinsed my mouth
this summer
with garlic wine,
as autumn draws near
the winds above my head flow clear.
143
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r 144
E n o u g h t o S a y I t ’ s F a r A Night When Sleep Is Far
After the sounds of wind and birds
have crowded away to the edge of sleep,
still in my memories of the mountain
there lingers the sound of water,
piercing to my bones.
Veins revolting as some disgusting beast;
if it might cleanse my fragile vessels . . .
but the only thing the dispiriting sound
of the water tells me, Back to your study
of mountains. I don’t know about that other; I don’t know.
Holding me aside,
meddling with the sound of my wife
and my children breathing . . .
How could you?
145
T r a n s l a t o r s ’ E p i l o g u e l
I first met Pak Chaesam in 1973, when my translation of his poem “Untitled” received the Commendation Award in the an-nual contest sponsored by the Korea Times. He attended the award ceremony, expressed cordial thanks for my interest in his work, and invited me to go out for a drink sometime.
We did eventually have our evening together, some months later, but for a long interval afterward, we lost touch. I kept reading his poems, though, drawn by qualities that I still find it difficult to describe directly. Emily Dickinson’s work and life, her role as something of an inside-outsider to the life of the town of Amherst and New England literary culture, has seemed the closest analogue.
During one of my trips to Seoul in 1996, I heard that Pak Chaesam’s health had taken an ominous turn. I called him and we talked for a while, but he told me he did not feel quite up to a meeting then. “Next time you are in Seoul,” he suggested.
But only a few months later, he was gone.
—DRM
l
Unlike my cotranslator David McCann, I never met Pak Chaesam during his lifetime. In fact, it probably would not have occurred to me to read his poems had it not been for those few lines in his poem “Untitled” about the train reaching the height of its fever by the orchards near Taegu. My very first ob-session with poetry had been with a verse about a train, though not a provincial passenger coach as in that poem, but 147
T r a n s l a t o r s ’ E p i l o g u e the Parisian Metro that spews out an apparition of faces,
“petals on a wet black bough,” in Ezra Pound. Where Pound himself stressed the imagistic instant, of a thing outward
“darting into” a thing inward, I used to relish, instead, the sense of utter anonymity of an urbanite, which I had considered myself living in metropolitan Seoul in the 1970s and 1980s, when the extensive subway lines were first laid throughout the city. I had little in me to relate to the world of shimmering waves and seaweed breezes in a seaside town. The quiet chamber of Pak’s lyricism, the stillness, for instance, of a courtyard through which the first raindrop on a plantain leaf resonates, was just as foreign to me as the “unfolding of the sea in the other shores of the Pacific” was to Pak Chaesam. But had I not ventured into the foreignness of a fishing village boy’s melancholy, I probably would never have learned what makes a boy a lyric poet. In the case of Pak Chaesam, it was neither the rolling bellows, nor the marine spirit h
anging fearlessly at the tip of a mast, but the fluttering of the widow’s skirt at the edge of a cliff as she threw herself into the depths of the sea that nurtured the yearning of a poet in a boy. As I read and translated his poems, I saw, emerging from the place quite different from the Parisian Metro, an apparition of faces—faces of women buried in the flowing folds of the skirt.
In looking back, this project has been for me a learning process, not only in translating poetry, but also in reading poetry. For translation is about difference, and much of my work here has involved negotiating differences—between the clamor in what I knew of late twentieth-century Korean poetry and the tranquility in Pak Chaesam’s world and between David’s splendid reading and my stubborn insistence on 148
T r a n s l a t o r s ’ E p i l o g u e rereading. I thank my friend and my teacher David McCann for having given me the chance to see what I would never have otherwise seen, and for having allowed me to learn from differences.
—JS
149
THE LOCKERT LIBRARY OF POETRY IN TRANSLATION
George Seferis: Collected Poems (1924–1995), translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated and edited by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman
C. P. Cavafy: Selected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard and edited by George Savidis
Benny Andersen: Collected Poems, translated by Alexander Taylor Selected Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, edited and translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
Poems of René Char, translated and annotated by Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin
Selected Poems of Tudor Arghezi, translated by Michael Impey and Brian Swann
“The Survivor” and Other Poems by Tadeusz Rózewicz, translated and introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
“Harsh World” and Other Poems by Angel González, translated by Donald D. Walsh Ritsos in Parentheses, translations and introduction by Edmund Keeley Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau, translated by Anne Winters Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Dante’s “Rime,” translated by Patrick S. Diehl Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller Osip Mandelstam’s “Stone,” translated and introduced by Robert Tracy The Dawn Is Always New: Selected Poetry of Rocco Scotellaro, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
