This poem, featuring the titles of the forty poems published in Cordite 35.2: OzKo (Hanguk-Hoju), officially brings to a close Cordite’s monumental Oz-Ko issue.
As I write this introduction, it occurs to me that the following interview constitutes my first unmediated communication with Kim Ki-taek (if we discount the technology through which we’ve communicated), that is to say a communication unmediated by a third, human, party.
This gallery contains 12 photos.
In August 2011, Korean poets Kim Ki Taek, Park Ra Youn, Hwang Tong-gyu and Park Hyung Jun landed in Australia for a ten day tour. They presented at the Melbourne Writers Festival and in Sydney at the Redroom Poetry Company. The tour was a reciprocal visit following the Cordite/Asialink tour of Korea in May.
Balloon’s earned his name. He’s a six-foot-two barrel of a man with a voice that booms. He’s a giant among Koreans. A gentle giant with a wide, open face. The day is hot. His brow drips when he gets excited. Bo Yeon brings him a tissue. Bo Yeon brings water and coffee. She brings a bandaid. She watches everything with a hopeful half-smile on her full moon-face. Hyung Seok sits between them. He has a long expressive face landscaped by a strata of old scars. His hands are delicate and when he talks his fingers make tiny sculptures in the air.
In a book I recently read with my students in an undergraduate translation class, the writer sets forth twenty provocative theses on translation in this era of globalization for a new comparative literature, ranging from ‘Nothing is translatable’ to ‘Everything …
Gay/Poet/Korea – it is not lost on me that with these three words I might well have been searching for myself, attempting to locate myself in a new context, a new country, but in the end the search produced Gi Hyeong-do.
Read four poems by Korean poet Gi Hyeongdo, translated by Gabriel Silvian. These poems, a special addition to Cordite 35: Oz-Ko, are accompanied by an interview between Gabriel Silvian and Oz-Ko touree Terry Jaensch on Gi’s life and poetic works.
여름날 아침 낡은 창문 틈새로 빗방울이 들이 친다. 어두 운 방 한복판에서 金은 짐을 싸고 있다. 그의 트렁크가 가장 먼저 접수 한 것은 김의 넋이다. 창문 밖에는 엿보는 자 없다. 마침내 전날 김은 직장과 헤어졌다. 잠시 동안 김은 무표정하게 침대를 …
주인은 떠나 없고 여름이 가기도 전에 황폐해버린 그 해 가을, 포도 밭 등성이로 저녁마다 한 사내의 그림자가 거대한 조명 속에서 잠깐씩 떠오르다 사라지는 풍경 속에서 내 弱視의 산책은 비롯되었네. 친구 여, 그 해 가을 내내 나는 적막과 함께 살았다. …
1 흩어진 그림자들, 모두 한 곳으로 모으는 그 어두운 정오의 숲 속으로 이따금 나는 한 개 짧은 그림자 되어 천천히 걸어 들어간다 쉽게 조용해지는 나의 빈 손바닥 위에 가을은 둥글고 단단한 공기를 쥐어줄 뿐 그리고 나는 잠깐 동안 그것을 만져볼 …
내가 살아온 것은 거의 기적적이었다 오랫동안 나는 곰팡이 피어 나는 어둡고 축축한 세계에서 아무도 들여다보지 않는 질서 속에서, 텅 빈 희망 속에서 어찌 스스로의 일생을 예언할 수 있겠는가 다른 사람들은 분주히 몇몇 안 되는 내용을 가지고 서로의 기능을 넘겨보며 書標를 …
(or, Someone’s Always Falling in Love with Korea and Doesn’t Want to Leave) I am at the boarding gate of Incheon Airport, waiting for my flight to be called and for my return journey to begin. I am wearing large …
Australian poets Ivy Alvarez, Barry Hill and Terry Jaensch, accompanied by Asialink Literature Programme Officer Nicolas Low and Cordite’s Managing Editor David Prater, met with five Korean poets on 18 May 2011 in Seoul. Read a summary of the event, including excerpts from the Koreans’ poems.
This gallery contains 20 photos.
The Conversations with Yi Sang project, co-organised by artist Jooyoung Lee, seeks to interrogate, engage with and memorialise the work of controversial twentieth-century Korean poet Yi Sang. View a gallery of images taken at the house during the Cordite tour of Korea in May 2011.
The task of bringing these poems to you has been nothing short of monumental. Starting with the combined efforts of twenty poets whose work was selected for this stage of the issue, followed by the Cordite editorial team’s struggles with the challenges of bi-lingual layout and formatting, and finally of course the crucial role played by our two Korean translators – 김재현 (Kim Gaihyun) and 김성현 (Kim Sunghyun) – it’s been a labour of love, and we hope you enjoy the results.
