Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from labor poet Park Nohae’s photo-essay collection One Day, which documents his travels and encounters through Burma/Myanmar, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. Park was a factory worker and anonymous dissident poet, who helped establish the South Korean Socialist Workers’ Alliance in the 1980s. For this, he was tortured, sentenced to […]

To celebrate the 97th year since the 1919 March First Independence Movement uprisings in Korea against the Japanese Empire, we present translated poems by three colonial-era Korean writers. Goldfish by Kim Kirimtranslated by Jack Saebyok Jung The goldfish thinks the air beyond the fishbowl is an unscalable sky.Suddenly, the goldfish is clothed in golden scales. […]

Many of Kim Hyesoon’s poems are gut-wrenching, uncomfortable, and irresistibly intestinal and intense. One of South Korea’s most influential contemporary poets, she refuses to conform to what she calls “[t]he woman’s voice made by Korean men, the voice that is even more feminine than a woman’s.” Her poetry is an expanding field in which she […]

The following excerpt from Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon with translation by Don Mee Choi is the third installment in The Pronoun folio of the Transpacific Literary Project. Find the rest of the folio here.     심장의 유배 마흔이레 누가 네 몸속에서 물을 길어 올리나 누가 네 몸속에서 섹스를 하고 있나 창밖에서 남자와 […]

Translator’s Diary January 31, 2021 Postwoman: In the third stanza, Kim Hyesoon (KH) lists Korean postpositions without any spaces: 은는이가 을를에의 와과만도 isareambe inonatof  andwithonlytoo The particles I chose are not exactly equivalent to Kim’s because equivalents are not easy to come by in my translation universe. They’re somewhat approximate while also very different than […]