You might think you don’t change when other people look at you. But that sense of stability is an illusion—one that this week’s Translation Tuesday, two poems from multidisciplinary Korean writer Heeduk Ra, is quick to disabuse us of. In “Aftermath,” Heeduk’s verses call to mind a prison cell with the paradoxical image of a room whose doors are “closed yet open,” a haunting reminder of how constant surveillance can erode any sense of self a person might have. This experience is taken to the extreme in “Shards,” where the interrelated metaphors of broken glass and sand in a shoe vividly conjure a life lived without a stable identity, a human being broken down by an indifferent world. Rendered in blunt, bittersweet English by Kyunghwa Lee, these poems admonish us to remember the ultimate fragility of our personhood. Read on.
Aftermath
Where the knob of the main entrance once had been
Is now a huge hole
With the knob now gone
Has the door become wall?
A fist slowly pushed itself through the hole
And roughly grabbed my wrist
It dragged me away, then brought me back again
When I returned, the door was open
The room is now full of the gazes of others
The desk, chairs, and bed all tremble with shame
This room is no longer mine
Anyone can enter
But once inside, no one can leave
The terror of doors
Lies not in being unable to open them
But in being unable to close them