Korean Short Stories
Kim Sa-In A Girl Hunched by the Fire Making Dumplings —I Will be her Man 부뚜막에 쪼그려 수제비 뜨는 나 어린 처녀의 외간 남자가 되어 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 Kim Sa-in Kim debuted in the journal Poetry and Economics (Shi wa gyeongje) in 1982, during the period of the military government’s oppressive rule. He chose to respond to the pain of the period rather than ignore it, as he made clear in the preface to his first poetry collection: “fragments of an ungoverned rage and pain tear at the heart. But by what other method could I have afforded food in the 70s and 80s?” He therefore tries to foreground “the human” in his poetry. His poems adopt a disciplined form, but the subjects described in them are people from the general walk of life, often deficient in character or even stupid-sounding. The poet thus confesses, “I feel the warmth of humanity more in naivete and clumsiness, rather than in perfection and smoothness.”. Kim defines writing poetry as ‘questioning things tirelessly’. But he emphasizes that the poet not only asks questions: he must also be one who finds answers and actively puts them into practice. By the same token, reading poetry means to participate in the poem with one’s whole being, to become a part of the poem. Kim’s poetics involves engagement with the poem, both by the poet who writes and the reader who reads. Poetry without full participation has no meaning. LTI Korea eLibrary: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/53
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A Girl Hunched by the Fire Making Dumplings— I Will be her Man That girl hunched by the fire making dumplingsI'll end up wasting my life, dependent on her ruddy, frozen hands. That girl with nowhere to go, only whimpers, crying alone, can't run away. She looks wretched, burned by the sun, but her breasts and thighs must be whiter than milk. I'll wake up late, bleary-eyed, sprawled over that body, wipe the sleep from my eyes with my thick, drooping beard. I'll rush over to the gambling room in the tavern at dawn. I'll snoop around for leftover drinks, flirt idly with the aging bar-woman, and once I'm drunk I'll drop and spend another day out back. I'll toss into the void a goodbye that no one hears, "I'm going now," then stumble home carrying starlight on my back. When ten to twenty years have gone by like that I'll have feebly spawned three or four children in her body. After spawning them I'll be impotent. That young girl only whimpers alone, nowhere to go. The children will grow up rough as badgers. Lying in a dirt-floored room as dark as a chimney, my head resting on my arm, I'll watch the dry snow flutter in through a crack in the fogged window. Noisily puffing bitter cigarettes, I'll let some more years go by. When that girl's waist grows thick and even her tears run dry and blue fire appears in her eyes, I'll suddenly fall badly sick and make my bed under a rack.
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I'll hide the liquor she doesn't want me to have and keep drinking. When her hair is half-white from years of hardship I'll finally expire ahead of her; by then she won't be able to laugh or cry. She'll smoke the bitter cigarettes I used to smoke, learn to drink the liquor she couldn't handle, learn to swear. Would this not be quite a hopeless love? Though I'm not sure if it makes any sense. Copyright 2009 Literature Translation Institute of Korea
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