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Patterns Lee Si-young Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony and Yoo Hui-Sok
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Lee Si-young
Patterns
Series No.: 182
ISBN: 978-1-55713-422-6, Pages: 279
Korean Literature, Poetry
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Patterns, by Korean poet Lee Si-young, represents the first, single volume, full-length translation of his poetry in English, a remarkable collection of his work dating from 1976 to 2007. This new collection reveals him as a major figure in contemporary Korean writing.
Born in Gurye, South Jeolla Province, in 1949, Lee Si-young began publishing poetry in 1969, leading to his first volume Manweol (Full moon) in 1976. Ten years passed before a second, Baram sokeuro (Into the wind) was published in 1986. Since then he has published regularly, with Gireun meolda chinguyeo (It's a long way, friend, 1988), Iseul maechin norae (Songs soaked in dew, 1991), Munui (Patterns, 1994). In 1996, he published Sai (Relationship) and in 1997 Joyonghan pureun haneul (Quiet blue sky). After a pause at the turn of the century he has become far more prolific with the publication in 2003 of Eunpit hogak (Silver whistle), in 2004 of Bada hosu (Sea lake), in 2005 of Argalui hyanggi (The smell of argal), and in 2007 of Uriui jugeun jadureul uihae (For our dead). He served as vice-president of Changjak gwa bipyeong Publishing Company for many years. He was awarded the Jeong Ji-Yong Literary Prize in 1996, the Dongseo Literary Prize in 1998, the Modern Buddhist Literary Prize in 2004, the Jihun Prize in 2004, the Baekseok Literary Prize in 2005, and the Republic of Korea Award for Culture and the Arts in 2007. He is currently in charge of the International Creative Writing Center at Dankook University.
Translator Brother Anthony is a member of the Community of Taizé. Born in Britain in 1942, he has been living in Korea since 1980, teaching in the English Department of Sogang University (Seoul), where he is now an Emeritus Professor. He is also Chair-Professor at Dankook University. He has published many English translations of Korean literature, including the volumes Songs for Tomorrow, Ten Thousand Lives
, and Himalaya Poems, by Ko Un, published by Green Integer. He is a Korean citizen since 1994; An Sonjae is his Korean name. His website is http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony.
Co-translator, Yoo Hui-Sok is a Professor in the English Department of Jeonnam University (Gwangju). He has published many critical studies of contemporary Korean literature, especially poetry.
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Book Review(s)
WORDS WITHOUT BORDER, 2015
by John Zeiser "Lee Si-young's 'Patterns'"
A writing professor of mine once admonished my class for praising a story simply because it jibed with our personal understanding of an experience or thing: in the case of the workshop, a student's short story about an Alzheimer's patient. Instead, my professor argued that fiction is effective when it makes us believe, regardless of or even in spite of its resonance with personal experience. Such advice obliges me to acknowledge my own bias, hopelessly intertwined with my reading of Korean poet Lee Si-young's Patterns. Having had the fortune of two fruitful years in Seoul, South Korea, I have strong memories of both city and country, and at times while reading Patterns I couldn't help thinking, yes, this is exactly how this looked, smelled, sounded, or seemed; ergo this poetry is good. I chuckled at his wry observations on Korean idiosyncrasies and shared in his depression about the peninsula's continued division. However, I would like to think that Lee's poetry, aided by limpid translations from Brother Anthony and Yoo Hui-sok, would have struck me even if I had never stepped foot in South Korea.
The selections in Patterns span more than thirty years, beginning with 1976's Manweol (Full Moon), and provide a careful outline of Lee's development as a poet. From the outset, his style is deceptively simple. Lee's poetry is influenced by the tightness of sijo, a traditional Korean poetic form marked by simple diction, aphorisms, and sudden line endings. The language is often serene, and bound to nature. The whole of the title poem "Patterns" reads:
Leaves gently fall from trees onto sidewalks.
Once someone tried to follow the leaves' shadows.
But what seem like small, self-contained lyrics often cut much deeper. Take for example the short prose poem "On an Escalator":
I have never before seen so many lively living creatures transformed in a flash into death's complexion.
The image in the poem is beautifully unsettling, and embodies Lee's tranquil gaze, disturbed by the crushing speed of modern life.
It's refreshing to encounter poems both lyrical and political. When poetry addresses significant, worldly issues, it risks being elliptical or ham-fisted, which distracts from the purely artistic merit of a poem. Lee, however, navigates these pitfalls adeptly. Concerns about capital, hypermodernity, the erosion of ancient traditions, and his country's division are all fitted neatly into Lee's natural, lyrical style.
Korean culture, with its orthodox Confucianism, is bound to family and place, which are often one and the same. But modernity has displaced many Koreans from their ancestral homes, much as it has displaced other traditions. Lee is especially adept at using family as a means to understand larger cultural anxieties that have been so pressing over the course of his life. In particular, it's his mother's biography and his relationship with her that stand as a microcosm for societal anxieties. In "Mother", published in 1986, Lee addresses what Korea is leaving behind by examining what he literally leaves behind every morning:
but once your son and his wife have rushed off to work wearing glasses
your day's only work is to take your grand-daughter
to kindergarten, holding her by the wrist.
His mother's life was not easy (colonial rule, two wars, and a life of farming), yet Lee also finds the rhythm of it, a repetitive contentment that accompanied the seasons:
When the rice sprouted in the plains you'd hum songs you'd picked up
in the factory, dig fields, do all kinds of work
like a manual laborer coming home with the moon high above
After all she had been through, Lee wonders, "How could you imagine you'd end here, cooped up like a bird/ in a cage at
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, May 2015
by Dan Disney This hefty pocketbook, Patterns, spans and selects from Lee Si-young's ten previous collections and maps the career of a wandering humanist actively making sense amid the flux and chaos of competing, shifting ideologies (from colonization, civil war, and military dictatorship to industrialization, then rampant neoliberalism). Born in 1949, a year before the Korean War, Lee scans an increasingly unrecognizable homeland; his poems are often ironic, humorous bucolics seeking to stabilize sites too quickly disappearing or disappeared. As his translators assert, he is "an intimate seer" and pliant-minded cosmopolitan participating "in the cosmic task" of glimpsing, naming, and perhaps purifying a particular and situated dialect.
Indeed, this is a poet prepared to stand up for values "squandered in the course of modern Korean history." Lee undertakes an encompassing flânerie, exploring places where "gun-smoke never clears"; we see curfews, underground interrogation rooms, and police approaching civilian protesters "as enemies"; comradely magpies nestle beside blue-skulled monks, and laden trucks veer dangerously along riverside highways; in downtown Seoul, a "63-story building" shines its "dazzling gold," while villages vanish under fog and then suburbia; fifty years after liberation, the poet wonders how to live in a place where "lilac grows in lands where human flesh is food."
In the book's eponymous aphorism, we understand the enormity of Lee's quest: "Leaves gently fall from trees onto sidewalks. / Once someone tried to follow the leaves' shadows." Is the poem an ode? An elegy? A confession? So often this poet's excursions burst through historical spaces to momentarily peer into magnitudes; so many of the poems in Patterns deepen particular apprehensions toward virtuosic resonance, which Lee hopes will enter his readers: "Like a spark, / no, like a first whole-hearted uttering of love."
One senses this is not a libidinous poetics of eros, though, but the purview and philia of ethical enactment. In older places of "scrap-merchants, taffy-vendors, junk sellers, / day-laborers," we see communities mobilized and swarming, often displaced and looking for connection, for ways into the surefootedness of well-being. Sometimes grim, always astonishing, Lee's poems are three-dimensional expressive snapshots; his meditative reflections act as desperate ontological encounters that never lose sight of either humans or their hegemonies.
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