Poetry follows the conservation of energy as much as anything else. An undergrad professor once told our class that she had learned Italian specifically to read Dante in the original. Speaking only one language myself, the idea of this has always entranced me. Considering the fact that poetry often challenges native speakers with its language, fluency at that level requires considerable work. I’ve taught poems in ESL classes before, like William Stafford's Travelling Through the Dark, with mixed results.
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| Why does Teacher Kevin want to kill deer? |
Anyway, Korean poetry can be exceedingly difficult to translate into English. The languages have little in common, unlike English with Romance or Germanic languages. Even spelling can cause trouble. “Cheju Island,” for example, is more commonly spelled Jeju now.
To return to the transmutation of poetry once again, reading foreign language poetry can sometimes open new corridors into our understanding and use of our own language. Perhaps, this it what happens to the original rhythm and other energies of the poem. Rather than simply vanishing, what is lost in translation is really recycled into something else. It’s a double-edged sword, but danger is important.
Rather than go on much more about a subject I have little formal study in, I think I’ll just put a poem here. This is Memory of the Graves by Ko Eun...who you can Google to find out biographical info on. He’s really interesting, but his life is not currently required. It’s a constant struggle to decide how much contextualization I should include with each poem. For this one, you aren’t getting much. Translated by David R. McCann.
Memory of the Graves
As a youth I was obsessed with graves.
There are six-hundred-and-eighty-nine
mounds in Hwandung Cemetery.
At Sarabong graveyard on Cheju Island
I would on the way every night
to sleep by the graveside.
Word spread that I was a ghost
residing in that cemetery.
A lucky day it was
when someone died and his grave was dug.
I would say with joy,
So, you have come here at last?
What can be a better place
to come to than this one?
At day’s end once
drunk as could be I fell asleep
somewhere among the graves
and was stung by a scorpion.
For a week I wore a piece of pumpkin
bandaged to my cheek,
all swollen, in deadly pain.
And again, as a novice monk
on my way to Marae Temple
in T’onggyong, I once spent half a day
in a graveyard, forgetting
the errand for my master,
a lapse that cost me dear.
A few decades drifted past
until I came to realize
wild animals have no graves!
Animals are better than man;
they are superior to God!
They do not leave their graves behind.
They are far better than myself.
Have I been infatuated, crying and weeping
over graves, in order to awaken
to this simple truth?
Funny you should choose to share a poem about graves when Katie, Elaine, Dad, Eileen, and I (and Delores through Katie and Elaine) spent a good half hour discussing our burial preferences. Looks like a lot of us will be cremated - no graves below, no bodies above, just ashes. Where will that fall in the scheme of things?
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