Korean Short Stories
Song Chanho Paulownia 오동나무 Translated by Wayne de Fremery
Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea . Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr
Paulownia I keep alive the memory of my visit to the paulownia. I needed a rest; we embraced, and my arms just reached around his waist. Had the black goat in charge of the strawberries lost his bronze bridle? He was ripping up the entire patch. The paulownia said it. The turtledoves near my crown use a scrap of sky for a blackboard at their school and the shade on the cultivated soil underfoot covers ten pyeong,* extending as far as my roots. It was his whole life, he said. Maybe that's what made the yellow paulownia noodles, served with mossy shade, that I ate sitting beneath the tree, so delicious. Perhaps that's why the cold tea his daughter served was so refreshing. In those days, the seasons were really intense. The crimson berries and the goat's two horns were a mess. At the creekside the stones and the carp bellies got so hard. I still remember the paulownia on the hill. The paulownia mailbox at the entrance to town across the bridge, the old paulownia grandfather clock in the entryway running five minutes slow, the paulownia clogs to which yellow clods of earth still stubbornly clung, the clack of the paulownia cutting board coming from the kitchen . . . Copyright 2008 Literature Translation Institute of Korea
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