Korean Short Stories
Jang Seoknam I Turn off the Light 불을 끈다 Translated by An Seonjae
Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea . Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr
About Jang Seoknam In the epilogue included in his first collection Defecting to a Flock of Birds (Sae ddedeul egero ui mangmyeong), he confesses that he dreams daily of fusing together his life with music. Literature, he suggests, is merely a code, a sign that cannot be understood by a blind man; while music can be understood by everyone. This certainly is a surprising claim for a poet. But Jang says “poetry is a beautiful raft I must take to get to music, to dance, to the blaze.” Most poets emphasize the absolute, transcendent qualities of language, but he does not mystify poetry or its medium, language, rather seeing it as a medium to reach something else that is absolute. Thus the poet boldly announces, “I lay down my head where the door to language is shut.” Jabbing at Descartes’ famous maxim “I think, therefore I am,” he says, “I exist completely as a poet only where language is absent.” Jang’s belief that ‘dance’ and ‘music’ are free from ‘language’ and ‘morality’ stems from his own individual ideas about language. Constantly absorbing worldly ideas and moral standards, language is impure and polluted. Yet language can never be abandoned because it serves as the basis for human thought and expression. Though it is impure, the poet tries attaining to expressions of ideal worlds such as ‘dance’ and ‘music.’ This worldview of the poet makes his poetry “musical,” not in the sense of rhythms and tones, but in the sense of aspiring to achieve the purity of music. He plays the instrument of silence called the world with language, and makes all things dance. This is the ideal aesthetic world that the poet seeks to create. LTI Korea eLibrary: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/327
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I Turn off the Light When I turned off the light everything revived with open eyes; I was really afraid. I shut my eyes. As I grew up, when I turned off the light nothing could be seen; that's good. Smiles may rise, tears may suddenly emerge, that's good. And then, after that, finally turning on the light again, all at once I'm already thirty, forty or fifty. When I turn off the light everything seems just like a pond; embracing in my arms the air as it slips away, like wild rose petals falling I feel my pulse.
Copyright 2008 Literature Translation Institute of Korea
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