Jack Saebyok Jung 정새벽
@daybreakjung
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NEA Translation 2024 / Yi Sang (2020, @WavePoetry) / Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (2025, Black Square Editions) / Assistant Professor of English @DavidsonCollege
Joined May 2009
Today is the official publication date of my debut poetry collection, Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus, published by Black Square Editions. Let me show you where I went when the music of words abducted me. You can purchase your copy directly from:.
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레파트 알라레어는 가자 지구 출신의 팔레스타인 시인이자 문학 교수였습니다. 그는 가자 이슬람 대학교에서 문학과 문예창작을 가르쳤습니다. 알라레어는 2023년 12월 7일 이스라엘 공습으로 그의 가족과 함께 사망하였습니다.
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i mean my god
define “locked in”.
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Walter Benjamin, from “One-Way Street” translated by Edmund Jephcott
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Seoul, July 28, 1934. You go to work at Government-General of Chōsen Library. You are police, a censor officer to be precise. Your job: to enforce the publication law. Your office has been buzzing since last week. Indeed, you don't see something like this on newspaper everyday.
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Cheon Sang-byeong is famous for his short lyrics that contained both the child-like wonder and profound alienation from the world. In 1967, he was tortured for suspicions of being a North Korean spy. His body never recovered. And yet, some of his best poems arrived afterwards.
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In 2014, @PoetKimHyesoon , the grand dame of Korean poetry, blogged anonymously for 8 months. Her persona was 않아 (ahn-ah), a personification of an adjunctive negation phrase in Korean. I finished my first translation of this blog in book form, titled "Thus Spoke n't." (1/4)
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Poet Ki Hyung-do atteneded college in the early 1980s in South Korea, when it was being ruled by a brutal military dictatorship backed by the U.S. Student-led protests for democracy were a constant in campus life. Here in this poem, he captures the alienation of the moment.
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The first page of Simone Weil’s “War and the Iliad” . …the purest and loveliest of mirrors.
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“Prelude” is one of the most beloved Korean poems by Poet Yun Dong-ju. Many Koreans can recite this poem from heart, and consider it their favorite without hesitation. Yun Dong-ju died in prison a few years after writing this poem, for fighting for freedom from the empire.
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In the early twentieth century, two young Korean poets met in the ancient city of Kyungju in the aftermath of the empire's ban on the use of Korean language. One of them wrote a poem about a beautiful flower shirt his friend had given him, the other wrote a poem in response.
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Korean diaspora in English all doing super cool stuff
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When she debuted in 2000, Jin Eun-young quickly became a sensation for her poetry of unfullfilled longing. She holds a phD in philosophy and wrote her dissertation on Nietzsche. Here is a translation for the ones who know what it can be like on Valentine's day.
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Some personal news! I've accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of English at @DavidsonCollege. I am overjoyed that I will get to continue working with my amazing students here in poetry workshops, translation seminars, and the literature of Asian diaspora. ❤️🔥😻.
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Poet Jang Jeong-il could not attend high school. At 19, he was jailed for violent misdemenor. He became a reader and writer in a prison library. While his works are mostly known for their surreal grotesqueness, some of his poems are written as sly challenges against power.
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Mudeung Mountain is near the city of Gwangju. In 1980, the city's people revolted against the military government of Chun doo-hwan regime. The citizens were massacred. Mudeung is a Buddhist term that roughly means "world beyond equality." Hwang ji-u's poem was published in 1985.
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“I held the man for nothing in my arms” - James Wright
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Hi everyone. Some news! I am overjoyed to announce that I will start working at @DavidsonCollege this fall as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English. I will be leading poetry workshops, design and teach courses on literature of Asian diaspora, and many more for next two years.
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"Proposal" was published in 2014. It was one of the last poems Jin Eun-young published before taking a long hiatus due to illness until she returned with a new book of poems in 2020. But during that time, the poem circulated online and her readers kept her words alive.
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Kim Sowol's poem 초혼(招魂/cho hon/calling ghost) is yet anther one of his famous and beloved poems. In traditional Korean ritual for the dead, the name of the recently deceased were called three times in a row. Some believe that this calling is the final attempt to revive them.
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I’m ecstatic to share that my translation of @PoetKimHyesoon’s wondrous collection Thus Spoke No (않아는 이렇게 말했다, @munhakdongne) will be published by @eccobooks in spring 2026. Thank you so much @depresssiongym for believing in this work. And @NEAarts for your support!
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After this equinox, tomorrow is the 110th Birthday of Yi Sang: the dark wizard, clown, and crown prince of modern Korean literature. Some still believe that his writings were the writings of a madman. Others think he was the greatest writer of his generation. A thread. 1/19
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In Korean, people are often called "mincho" (민초/民草), meaning "people of grass" or "grass people." The word is used to emphasize how numerous we are, how insignificant we may seem, and how we live on. "Grasses" by Kim Soo-young is commonly read as a variation on this theme.
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The weight of the world / is love - Allen Ginsberg, from “Howl and other poems” (1956)
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so no one stopped and thought, "wait, he is recommending five best novels from a single country and four of them are his co-translations?".
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Seoul, July 31, 1934. You are a clerk at a Korean-language print shop. The delivery pick up the morning editions. With a sign filled with relief, you open the paper to look at the "poem" again. It had taken all your art to get the movable type set the way the "poet" had wanted.
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Seoul, the morning of July 24, 1934. It's been more than two decades since the empire's takeover of your country. Reading your newspaper during commute, you feel the world teetering toward the abyss. Seeking solace, you flip to the arts page, but then you see something very odd.
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Park Mok-wol as a member of Blue Deer School, a group of three young poet who suvived teh last years of Japanese rule in Korea. Their poetry, collected in Blue Deer Book, drew inspiration from Korean landscapes and the rhythm of spoken Korean in the aftermath of colonial ruin.
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There are many ways to read Yi Sang's most famous poem. Perhaps the simplest reading will suffice. He was terrified of what his society was doing to the children.
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Tomorrow (well, it is already tomorrow in Seoul) marks the 90th anniversary of the first serial publication of Yi Sang's infamous "Crow's Eye View" poems. I will start posting my @WavePoetry translations and originals over the next two weeks to honor the occasion. Stay tuned!
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I am truly grateful to share that my project of translating @PoetKimHyesoon’s “Thus spoke n’t” has been awarded 2024 Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. Thank you @NEAarts. Honored to be among such amazing group of translators.
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After high school, Park Nohae worked as a manual laborer. He also wrote poetry, and his first collection “Labor’s Daybreak” (1983) sent a shockwave in Korea with its depiction if the harsh realities faced by laborers. It was immediately banned and the poet lived in hiding.
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Kim Chong-sam belonged to a generation of poets who came of age during the Korean War. Unlike some of his contemporaries who were drawn to cutting-edge poetic forms and maximalism, Kim Chong-sam was drawn to silence, and his poems were characterized by absences and excisions.
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Gim Yeong-rang was a poet and an independence activist in the colonial era. He published one book of poetry. When Korean poets were forced to write only in the empire’s language, he stopped writing. He never titled his poems. The following piece is his most well-known work.
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"Homesick" was written by the Korean poet Jeong Ji-yong in his early 20s, just before he left for Japan for his studies. The musicality in the original is quite overwhelming, and I wasn't able to capture much of it, but here is an attempt.
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A Korean Meme, translated. "Elementary School Student's Poem.". You can do it.people told me. Be brave.people told me. So I became.brave. And bravely .said.I can't.
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Hey folks, thank you all so much for joining me in celebrating the 90th anniversary of Yi Sang's Crow's Eye View poems since July 24th. At the time of its release, it was the most controversial debut in Korean literary history—and it likely still holds that title today.
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Hey folks, so this is a poster from an upcoming game called "Limbus Company" by @ProjMoonStudio. Their in-game characters are based on literary figures, both real and fictional. One such character is based on Yi Sang. They plagiarized my Yi Sang translation for the poster. (1/3).
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Realizing this is the book he wrote after he got demolished by the literary establishment of his time and was in pretty much self-imposed exile in France.
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Choi Ha-rim was known as the poet of the middle path in contemporary Korean poetry, traversing through both the metaphysical heights of Korean modernists and the rugged realism of Korean activist poetics. In the following lines, the poet helps us to pause for a moment.
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Kim Sowol (1902-1934), despite his status as being perhaps the most important Korean lyric poet, is often considered apolitical in his writing. However, if you read him deeply, you discover that he was quite. Here he is writng when Koreans had their lands stolen by colonizers.
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Yi Sang's 111th birthday will be next week, 9/23. The once and future king of Korean poetry, I think he would have liked number 111. He loved repetition. And in his poetry he kept returning to how a mirror "repeated" his image. A thread. (1/17).
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"Does Spring Still Come To These Stolen Fields" by Yi Sang-hwa, written during the occupation and published in 1926, is a poem of resistance and elegy for those whose lands were stolen from them.
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A small announcement. I am grateful. Thank you, Black Square Editions and John Yau for giving my first book of poetry a chance.
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Kim Hyesoon’s book of poetry-proses, “Thus Spoke n’t,” follow a character named 않아 (n’t) which is a particle that negates the whole sentence when it is used in Korean, surviving as a soul in a country called Aerok, a palindrome of Korea.
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A poem I wrote in 2nd grade. My mom keeps it framed. 😅
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Friends, many of you follow this account for brief glimpses of Korean poetry in English. But poetry is nothing without people. Tragedy in Itaewon breaks my heart and there are no words. Poetry is not needed now, but it will be here when you need it the most. Stay safe out there.
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.@ProjMoonStudio, 공식 사과문을 올려주셔서 감사합니다. Thank you, Project Moon Studio, for quickly taking care of this issue and for posting this apology. I am sincerely grateful to all of you who came out in support for the translator's rights.
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Kim Joong-shik's poetry was once described as the final form of "baeksoo/백수" poetry. We might call it a bum poetry, or even a beat poetry. The central metahpor in the following poem is a play on Korean word for meteorite, 별똥, which one could translate as starshit.
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Wait. Is that why he called himself Yi Sang? You look at Yi Sang's poem again. A diagnosis of the patient's face. The number board is flipped like a mirror image. You look at yourself in the mirror. Before an understanding can take hold, you remind yourself: it's a zero-sum game.
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August 3, 1934, Seoul. You are Jeong Ji-yong, a leading Korean poet and mentor to a new generation of writers. Opening the newspaper, you find the work of the most controversial poet you helped debut. "Ah, thank goodness," you think, "he's finally showing his prose poems."
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Ham Hyeongsu is a minor poet from 1930s Korea. The following poem is his most famous. There may be a pun in the Korean original's title, which could be transalted as "Sunflower's Scream" Ham published only a few poems in life. The dedication remains a mystery.
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Gonna be slightly insufferable on the main…but there’s like maybe five people in the world who knows how insanely hard this was to do 😭. I dare you to try and carry experimental stream of consciousness style from one language to another 😭😭.
An update. Just finished rough translations two more short stories by Yi Sang, bringing the collection to a total of 12. That is all of short prose fiction by Yi Sang. This manuscript can now be reasonably called Complete Short Stories of Yi Sang. 1
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DALL·E prompts for these were "an oil painting of Korean intellectuals debating at a cafe in 1930s Seoul"
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In 1942, Yun Dong-ju left Korea to study in Japan. A key theme in his poetry is that of shame as a survivor of dark times. Later, he joined a Korean student-led conspiracy to fight for liberation. He was caught and jailed, likley experimented on by the military. He died at 27.
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August 15th in Korean Independance Day from the Empire. Poet Yun Dong-ju was arrested for thought crimes, and it is suspected that he was subjected to medical experiments that led to his death. Korea gained independence 6-months after his passing.
In 1942, Poet Yun Dong-ju left Korea to study English literature in Japan. Many Korean poets and writers by 1940s either stopped writing or became collaborators of the empire as its oppression grew worse. Yun kept writing poetry of resistance. He died in prison at age 27.
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Bruh this is the literal dialogue from the show. Be serious.
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Seoul, July 25th, 1934. You've forgotten that strange writing you read yesterday. Gotta get to work. Make your parents proud. Let the world spin madly on with its wars and oppression. Be a good son. Be a good father. Still, you open your newspaper. And, oh boy, here we go again:
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Coming in at 57699 words, here is my translation manuscript if Yi Sang’s short stories. These ten stories (I think) form a cycle of Yi Sang’s visions that expand and contract the space-time of 1930s colonial Seoul. So glad to have this done before the new year.
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My mom (on the left) and her colleagues at the end of a long day at the hospital. They are still fighting out there, folks.
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One of the Korean word for family is Shik-gu (식구/食口), which literally translates as "people who eat together". The following is the first poem in a collection titled "River" (1987) by Koo Kwang-bon, who was praised for his plainspoken style.
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It is my great pleasure to share with you my previously unpublished translations of Yi Sang's prose sketches via @parisreview . In them you will find Yi Sang's wicked sharpness and tender heart. Yi Sang's other essays are collected in @WavePoetry's "Yi Sang: Selected Works".
“It is then I realize the fire might reach my dwelling. I quickly return home, finding my mother trembling, clutching and pulling dirty blankets in confusion.”. Read excerpts from a serialized column by Yi Sang from 1936, translated by @daybreakjung.
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Garamond lied to me about the quality of my writing.
My wife tells me I’m the last person on earth to use Times New Roman. Please tell me it ain’t so.
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Poet Jeongrye Choi (최정례 선생님) passed away yesterday. She was a dear friend. We often talked about poetry in Korean and English. One time, I showed her my favorite Shakesperean sonnet, No. 65. She loved this line from it and wrote a poem. I can't believe she is gone now.
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Two openings of the Iliad in English. Wilson (2023) and Pope (1899)
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I am delighted to share with you my translations of @PoetKimHyesoon’s po-prose (시산문, poetry prose) and @fijaelee2’s artwork from <Thus Spoke n’t>. Many thanks to Black Sun Lit for this space.
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"Yi Sang: Selected Works" has been honored with MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for literary translation. I am so grateful to the selection committee! And I am truly happy for Yi Sang translation team! @sawakonakayasu @JoyelleMcS @DonMeeChoi @WavePoetry
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Beautiful reprint/modernized editions of classic volumes of early 20th Century Korean poetry from @openbooks21. Korean poems written in Korean script flourished despite the Japanese annexation of Korea, 1910-1945. Most of these poets didn’t live to see beyond their 30s.
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August 1, 1934. After working all night, you return home with a full make up on. You can still smell your customers on you. Paper's been delivered. You open it and see your lover's poem. Were you still lovers? You haven't been reading them, but you know how happy he's been.
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Always astounded by Milton’s blank verse. You always hear about how rhythm needs to run over the linebreak to make the enjambment successful. And then this guys just does it effortlessly for like next 10,000 lines, and it is the most gorgeous word-music you’ve ever heard.
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In 1930s, Poet Kim Kwang-sŏp was a high school English teacher in Korea. In his classes, he taught his students to resist the empire, and openly criticized authorities for shuttering newspapers. He was arrested and tortured. He survived and became a poet.
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Experimental translation of a classic Korean poem by Han Yong-un. The original poem is often read differently depening on who you ask. Could be about losing one's country, or about one's relationship with Buddhist enlightment, or just about a romantic relationship gone badly.
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Today, I was reading that Pluto is going directly into Capricorn, and that its been in that sign retrograding for 15 years. It is now preparing to move out of the goat's shadow and bring every machination to light. The cosmic movement reminded me of Kim Hyesoon's poem, "Pluto."
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Translating Kim Hyesoon's "Thus Spoke n't", I initially thought of the form she was using to the same as lyric essay. But then, deeper I got into the text, it became obvious that this wasn't right. In her Afterword, the poet elliptically dances around a definition of her form:
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Me: Excitedly looks up what Korean version of this awesome movie's title will be. The title in Korean: 에브리씽 에브리웨어 올 앳 원스. Me: Oh.
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The translation work began the June of this year. Thank you @PoetKimHyesoon for allowing me to work on this. I will continue to polish it, and I hope these incredible revelations will find their way to English-language readers soon. (4/4)
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Excerpts from translations of beautiful Korean poems designed as postcards.
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Kim Sowol's poem "Jindallae Flower" (Korean name for Azalea) is easily the most well-known poem in Korea. Sowol's poetry is noted for its distinct musicality and themes of isolation and longing. He was mostly unknown by his contemporaries and died in extreme poverty.
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Experimental Translation of Yi Sang's "Crow's Eye View: Poem No. 1". In the senseless sinking of ferries, in mass shootings, in fire bombings,.the poem returns again and again and again and again.
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In Baek Seok's poetry, his speakers are exiles. Moments of belonging are rare, but they shine when they appear. The following poem is such a moment. Here, the poet visits a doctor of traditional Korean medicine, in which counting pulse on wrist is the main method of diagnosis.
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A fully vaccinated poetry translator unable to contain his joy at local bookstore ❤️🥰🙏 @PorterSqBooks
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@WavePoetry Korean publishers were required by law to send you their drafts before going to print. You and your fellow officers pored over every word to ensure everything was 'proper.' Newspapers kept you busy, and often boring. This week, however, has been an exception.
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In 1942, Poet Yun Dong-ju left Korea to study English literature in Japan. Many Korean poets and writers by 1940s either stopped writing or became collaborators of the empire as its oppression grew worse. Yun kept writing poetry of resistance. He died in prison at age 27.
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Seoul, August 4, 1934. You are part of the resistance, an agent of the Korean government in exile. In time, they will call you a freedom fighter. For now, a terrorist. Sitting at an outdoor café, you open a newspaper. Nothing out of the ordinary. except, what the hell is this?
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A major poet of Korean modernism, Jeong Ji-yong had been working as a high school teacher for five years when he wrote this poem. The penultimate line in Korean is a visual pun on a hanja character Myung (明/명), which is a "marriage" of characters for sun and moon.
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