[K-Poem] Paper Prison
[K-Poem] Paper Prison
  • Ra Heeduk
  • 승인 2021.12.02 00:27
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  So here, in this room where anyone can turn the light off and on, in this room where one can lock the door and go out, why have I crouched down so long

  Refurnishing the thinning blood with ink
  Moving from one book to another, from this chair to that
  Among the walls crowded with books
  And the piles of documents precariously heaped
  Why have I passed my life chewing only shreds of paper

  This prison, so safe and free
  That visitors could not recognize it as a prison
  Even the guard has gone away forgetting he confined me there

  Here poetry starts to resemble hieroglyphics
  In my mouth rustles earth instead of words
  It seems one cannot go out on one’s own feet
  Like the type printed on paper
  Turning Rotten or scrawny

  As a brick house may suddenly become a brick tomb
  A face to unearth in the remains after the paper walls collapse

  Do not wait for a poem to germinate from the paper

  So today, in this old room, in this room where the sun comes in only 30 minutes a day, to know that anything that glitters perilously is not just a fluorescent lamp

  - 2017 Today’s Poetry Award-winner

 

 


Ra Heeduk made her literary debut by winning the 1989 Jungang Ilbo Annual Spring Literary Contest. Her major poetry collections include To the Roots, The Words Stained the Leaves, It’s Not That Far from Here, What is Darkening, A Missing Palm, Wild Apples, A Time When the Words Return, and Filename Lyric Poetry. Her prose collections include A Half Bucket of Water, Remember Those Lights, I’m Going to Get There on Foot Step by Step, and Wrinkles of Art. She has earned several major prizes including the Paeksuk Literature Award, the Midang Literary Award, the Sowol Poetry Prize, the Contemporary Literature Prize and the Kim Sooyoung Literature Prize. She is currently a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

Translated by Kim Kooseul / Darcy Paquet

 

* 《Cultura》 2021 December (Vol. 90) *



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