Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

This post is another one about translation. It is also about how sometimes if you’re lucky, you’ll run across a poem that is so engaging, challenging, novel, mesmerizing, that you will spend days thinking about it. Kim Hyesoon’s poem “Inside-Bird and Outside-Bird” is for me one of those poems. I really wish I knew how to read Korean so I could follow the translation first-hand and see the magic of both the original and the translation by Don Mee Choi.

“Poetry” magazine has turned me on to Korean poetry. There’s anther piece by Kim Hyesoon in this issue called “Double S Double S” that is bonkers. So much interesting stuff going on! I really think you should track this issue down and see for yourself.

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here is a short stanza from the poem “Inside-Bird and Outside-Bird”:

From up in the air I can see
you and me walking
as if I were looking at the fish
trapped beneath the ice