For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we’re presenting two highly evocative poems by Korean poet Park Ju-Tak. The first, “Missteps”, portrays a group of men, “hard as insomniac stones”, whose fragile companionship seems to be threatened by an overwhelming yet nebulous existential dread. “I Am Not an Atheist” forcefully buffets us with its speaker’s emotional turmoil; a hyperawareness of “the cyanic death that comes with mortality” provokes a confrontation with the divine. But the poems escape clear interpretation, and perhaps feel most similar to paintings—the mysterious cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper come to mind. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s sensuously renders Park’s distinctive atmospheres, bringing his unsettling afterimages into high relief.
Missteps
No one kept track of the time.
The men who needed a long talk did not return to their homes.
A car drove by, its headlights on.
And then—those men of few words—disappeared into a bar;
a brief silence settled in.
It was a starless night,
our natures hard as insomniac stones
and tainted, just like the world.
One man stepped out of the bar,
and as he walked along the visible street—
the dark street, with its open lips—
he saw shadows still trapped in the bar
and insects dead on the cement floor.
The wind blew. The remaining men all rose.
Afterwards, darkness engulfed
the street toward which they walked,
their many hands fluttering in the air.
I Am Not an Atheist
Regret came with the dark evening
and locked me in a garden of night.
I tore out the hearts of trees
and lit up the room.
I stand on the desolation of tragedy.
While stone statues disperse their restless shadows
and dark clouds cover my chest,
I raise insidious walls inside.
The cyanic death that comes with mortality—
where does it await, breathing?
In the night, all arustle with flights of falling leaves,
the wind opens its mouth to read my eulogy
and blows my will away.
I sit where the cliff’s waters flow beneath my feet,
and the black, lushly-forested mountains tremble
with a punishment forgiven by God’s grace,
I, who cannot sleep,
Translated from the Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl
Park Ju-tak (born 1959) made his literary debut in 1986 when his poem “The Shifting Architecture of Dreams” won the Kyunghyang Shinmun New Year’s Literary Contest. He is also a winner of the Lee Hyeong-gi Award and the Korean Poets Association Award. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Contemporary Poetry and a professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University. His poetry collections include The Shifting Architecture of Dreams (1991), Under a Desert Star (1999), The Pupil of Time (2009), and When We Need Another Earth (2013).
Heinz Insu Fenkl is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. His most recent novel, Skull Water, was one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2023” and his first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist. His fiction and translations have appeared in The New Yorker and he is the translator of the classic 17th-century Korean Buddhist novel, The Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung. His co-translation (with Yoosup Chang) of Lee Chang-dong’s Snowy Day and Other Stories was just published by Penguin Press.
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Read more from the Asymptote blog:
- Translation Tuesday: Two Poems from the Middle Korean
- Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Shin Kyeong-nim
- Translation Tuesday: “Snow” by Guka Han