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우리는 매일 매일
총 49편의 시를 3부로 나누어 싣고 있는 두번 째 시집. 깊이 앓고 오랜 시간 사유하고서야 비로소 얻어지는, 우리의 가슴과 머리를 동시에 치고 가는 낯선 은유들로 가득하다. 그러나 그 은유들은 지극히 단정하고 또 아름답기까지 하다. 치열한 의식과 환하게 빛나는 시어의 간극, 차가움과 달콤함의 이율배반적 공존에서 재조합된 진은영 특유의 청신한 시적 세계가 펼쳐진다.
134 pages, Paperback
First published August 22, 2008
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April 8, 2021
This book was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk prize in translation in 2019. The judges wrote that “YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker have created a wonderfully supple, lasting music through their translation.” As Ji and Parker suggest in the Introduction, we have to find a new way to read these poems, quieting our rage for understanding as we go. There are progressions of images in the poems, and sometimes images—a wounded forehead, glass petals and glass flowers, the nipple of a balloon—carry over from one poem to the next. I wonder, too, with her, why “Washed clothes take so long to dry,” and about the shoe seller’s fixations with time—drunken time, a Big Ben clock, the cuckoo’s funny cries, and the wristwatch memory never wore. Eun-young drops a delightful color into nearly every stanza of her poems. She’s not merely a visual imagist poet, though; these poems are full of sounds, textures, tastes, and fragrances as well. And more than once an image as from a surrealist painting surprises: “birds soar through the hole pierced in my back” (“Before the Rooster Crows”).
Some of these techniques may be from the surrealists’ playbook, such as the incongruous image: “the moon’s eyelashes are long.” But others are definitely not, as when she reverses time, playing the tape backward: “Like the smell of blood from a temple firing into the round muzzle of a black pistol” in “A Muffler Named Vladimir.”
“A Day When I’m Sick and Alone” reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s attempt to capture in an essay the feeling of illness approaching delirium, in “On Being Ill.”
Eun-young makes fun of the critic’s attention to unimportant details in “To a Critic,” and suggests the critic’s pronouncements might be less than respectable: “Be sure to feel the whoosh of something whooshing through the crotch of your thin pants.” She makes a note to herself in “To Me”:
Burn the hardback book.
predict something,
love contingency.
The epigraphs she gleans from her readings in philosophy—Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Descartes—are also like notes to herself, especially the one by Spinoza about being careful not to mock or execrate what is, after all, merely human. And to love the human is also to love contingency. And in “Friend,” she revises Descartes’ first principle so that the presence of a friend, rather than doubt, assures us of our existence.
The conceit of one poem is a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein, written by Rainer Maria Rilke and found in Rodin’s studio. The writer scornfully rejects the offer of a grant from Wittgenstein’s foundation because it’s too small. While other poets may be content to write ekphrastic poems describing a painting, Eun-young’s “Painting” is a regular mashup of the arts, as the people in two competing paintings read or recite Neruda and Eliot while playing the cello well and the piano badly.
I don’t want to suggest all these poems are light or funny. They are not, and some evoke the lost innocence of childhood, the death of immigrants as they attempt to find a better life, and the futility of contemporary poets ever developing the power of Goethe’s Werther, that drove readers to suicide.
These poems cannot have been easy to translate. But Parker and Ji give a sense of sureness to the images and turns of Eun-young’s lines. We are startled, we wince, we laugh, and we marvel as she surely must have intended.
Some of these techniques may be from the surrealists’ playbook, such as the incongruous image: “the moon’s eyelashes are long.” But others are definitely not, as when she reverses time, playing the tape backward: “Like the smell of blood from a temple firing into the round muzzle of a black pistol” in “A Muffler Named Vladimir.”
“A Day When I’m Sick and Alone” reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s attempt to capture in an essay the feeling of illness approaching delirium, in “On Being Ill.”
Eun-young makes fun of the critic’s attention to unimportant details in “To a Critic,” and suggests the critic’s pronouncements might be less than respectable: “Be sure to feel the whoosh of something whooshing through the crotch of your thin pants.” She makes a note to herself in “To Me”:
Burn the hardback book.
predict something,
love contingency.
The epigraphs she gleans from her readings in philosophy—Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Descartes—are also like notes to herself, especially the one by Spinoza about being careful not to mock or execrate what is, after all, merely human. And to love the human is also to love contingency. And in “Friend,” she revises Descartes’ first principle so that the presence of a friend, rather than doubt, assures us of our existence.
The conceit of one poem is a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein, written by Rainer Maria Rilke and found in Rodin’s studio. The writer scornfully rejects the offer of a grant from Wittgenstein’s foundation because it’s too small. While other poets may be content to write ekphrastic poems describing a painting, Eun-young’s “Painting” is a regular mashup of the arts, as the people in two competing paintings read or recite Neruda and Eliot while playing the cello well and the piano badly.
I don’t want to suggest all these poems are light or funny. They are not, and some evoke the lost innocence of childhood, the death of immigrants as they attempt to find a better life, and the futility of contemporary poets ever developing the power of Goethe’s Werther, that drove readers to suicide.
These poems cannot have been easy to translate. But Parker and Ji give a sense of sureness to the images and turns of Eun-young’s lines. We are startled, we wince, we laugh, and we marvel as she surely must have intended.
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