Appearing first in its Korean original as 동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스(Seoul: Moonji Publishing) in 2017, The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) is avant-garde poet Seo Jung Hak’s second collection, and his debut in the Anglosphere. To me, as a writer and reader of prose poetry and its permutations from the Arabic qaṣīdat al-nathr to the Japanese sanbunshi, Seo’s writings move with the silken grace of the Korean sanmunsi tradition. Forged by turn-of-the-century poets like Han Yong-un, Jeong Ji-yong, and Joo Yo-han, the sanmunsi found fertile ground when Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Threshold’ was rendered into the Korean as ‘Munŏgu’ by the poet and publisher Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published in the October 1914 issue of the literary journal Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth). The sanmunsi later became, as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry notes, a ‘notable . . . form, redolent of the aestheticism then intriguing Korean writers’.

Seo Jung Hak reimagines the sanmunsi through ‘paper box’ poems and absurdist tales, crafting language and aesthetics to uncover the poetic in the mundane and to confront globalisation’s homogenising agenda. His translator, Megan Sungyoon, frames his work as a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of outdated ideology and bureaucracy, late capitalism and unrelenting consumerism, and hyper-commercialized culture industry to make an ironic patchwork of languages of the past and present’. 

In this interview, I spoke with Seo and Sungyoon, both in Seoul, about the sanmunsi, The Cheapest France in Town, and the ways in which one can resist linguistic homogeneity.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Jung Hak, can you take us through the years between 1999—when the earliest poems in The Cheapest France in Town began taking shape—and 2017, when the collection was first published? What was your process while putting these poems together? 

Seo Jung Hak (SJH): I have been writing poems since 1991. It took me a few years to publish my first poetry collection, and eighteen more years would pass until I published my second. Personal things happened in the meantime; I got married, had a child, wrote poems on commission for literary magazines, earned some money, bought a car, lost someone, and played lots of video games. Indeed, these things are not very interesting to talk about. My personal history may mean something to me, but not to most of the people reading this interview. I’ve just lived along the currents of the world, with enough swinging and swaying. READ MORE…