When we think of Oh Eun, the poet and his poetry, the first thing that comes to mind is wordplay—a childlike delight in playing with language. Of the many forms wordplay can take, Oh Eun’s poetic technique and voice are most defined by homonymy and the maximization of its effect. An example is the way he freewheels through the many words that share the pronunciation “seol”—New Year’s Day, tongue (頍), speech (飹), snow (馯)—all in a single poem, displaying a sophisticated sensitivity to language, an effervescent tone, and a distinct aesthetic sense. This is the poetry of Oh Eun we’re all familiar with, a realm of his own where no one else can approach him. (Incidentally, Korean homophones rarely carry over nicely into other languages. This will be the greatest challenge facing any translator of Oh Eun’s poetry.)

        But while his poetry reads very much like a child’s innocent play, this doesn’t mean it can be passed over with a cursory glance. Whether intentionally or otherwise, it imparts a sense of weighty thematic concerns lying beneath the surface. The desire and lack levied upon individuals under the capitalist system, the social class conferred upon a person at birth and the inequalities arising from it—at the base of his poetry is a series of topics far removed from light wordplay. A tone of sadness, stemming from not only human limitations but the limitation of all beings in this world, prevents us from passing over it lightheartedly. Especially in his most recent work, we find this tone of sadness lying densely at the deepest level of his poetry.

        His most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, once again effortlessly blends this characteristic levity of voice, depth of thought, and undertone of sadness, but a new feature is apparent as well—the intensive use of pronouns. The word “pronoun” appears in the title of the collection, and the table of contents is a lineup of identically-titled poems named after the pronouns “There,” “That,” “Those,” “Them,” “He,” “You,” and so on, while even more pronouns overflow from the main text. Before we dig in to this rich feast of pronouns, let’s take a moment to savor the concept of the pronoun itself.

        According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, a pronoun is “a word used in place of a person or thing’s name. Or, the term for the part of speech referring to such words.” Put simply, it is a word that replaces a noun. That is, a word that presupposes a noun. We could go as far as to say it is a word that can exert no power without a noun. Without the noun for a thing—for instance, a chair—a pronoun like this or that ends up referring to nothing or to anything at all. Our ability to use a given pronoun with confidence presupposes that there is already a noun ascribed to its referent. Occasionally, there are times when we struggle to remember the noun—when we can clearly picture the thing but can’t remember its name—but this is another case in which a pronoun is useful. The pronoun steps in to take the place of the noun, however insufficiently, until we can recall the name of the thing. Or when we’ve encountered a thing for the first time, and we don’t yet know its name or still haven’t come up with a name for it, then a pronoun comes in handy. In this sense, a pronoun is a faithful complement to a noun.

        On the other hand, sometimes pronouns are used in a way that flips their presumed role as a replacement or auxiliary on its head. In other words, there are moments when we witness an inversion of the hierarchical perception that the referent comes first, followed by the noun, followed by the pronoun. Such scenes play out occasionally in philosophy and literature, and to an extreme in Oh Eun’s poetry. The abundant pronouns in The Pronoun for Nothingness are evidence of this.

        To break the hierarchical order of referent-noun-pronoun, Oh Eun’s poetry goes on the offensive against nouns, as in, “The starlight appeared and the star was gone / The mountain bird sang and the mountain went away / The seawater swelled and the sea dried up // Like a word forgetting its meaning / The moment it’s pronounced” (“That”). Here, “star,” “mountain,” and “sea” all function as names for things and play the role of denoting their meanings as well as referring to them, but the moment the word is uttered, what disappears is the star, the mountain, and the sea—that is, the thing itself. As soon as we realize that the noun is unrelated to the real object it presupposes, the pronoun which takes its place also loses its relation to the thing itself and the noun which names it, and the frame of the hierarchy is broken. The noun and pronoun become equal in being nothing more than words. There is no serious distinction between them, as they can both be separated from the thing itself at any time.

        Since a word is only a word, it cannot maintain unique coordinates. It takes on a different meaning with each use, in each new context and situation. How unstable, how uncertain is the meaning of “person” in the lines, “Lucky to be a person, and / Even luckier not to have been” (“They”)? Staring down the fact that each person in this poem is every bit as unstable and uncertain as the pronoun they which collectively replaces them, Oh Eun’s poetry does not restrain its offensive to nouns only, nor even to language as a whole, which nouns might be expected to represent. The referent of language, the thing itself, is just as hard to pin down. When someone signs off on a new place because it has three windows, only to discover on moving day that the three windows have become two (“He”), is this simply a misperception? Or did the thing itself change? Either way, the outside world is no longer so easy to trust. You can never be sure when things will change, when perceptions will change, when language will change.

        When “They only looked away for a second / And this ceased to be this / This gave up on being this / They go back into the bathroom / They search the utility closet up and down / But this never shows back up” (“This”), the unstable mutability of the world/perception/language represented by this applies just as much to us—both the thing itself and the concept—as well as to me—both thing and concept. When we use the word us, we may grow close enough to share secrets, but this we is only a temporary result, unable to go beyond the we “outside the parentheses” (“We”). Whether the real we sits outside the signifier we or the signifier we sits outside the real we, in every moment that we are referred to as we, we grow more distant from us. A we  wrenched further apart with each invocation.1 And this situation cannot simply be avoided by me.

        For instance, in the lines, “Alone / In the bathroom // All by myself, and still / It was an effort for me to smile” (“Me”), myself is wrenched apart from me, whether the signifier or the thing itself, imparting some sense of why I can only ever be other to myself. The somber but not unfamiliar realization that it takes effort to move myself, just as it would to move another, produces a keen sense of the futility of the desire to name, describe, or capture the thing itself. And when you are “born a proper noun but [. . .] often called a pronoun,” and live out your life hopping from adjective to numeral, verb, determiner, adverb, and so on, this is why the last thing you have to say is something like a self-pitying sigh: “Oh, this wasn’t the sentence!” (“You”). We wander through so many sentences only to find the wrong one. As long as we live, we will continue to choose the wrong sentence, and the final sentence we choose to sum up our lives is bound to be wrong too.

        This predicament resulting from the unbridgeable gap between language and thing, sign and object, signifier and signified, leaves a bitter aftertaste. But Oh Eun’s poetry does not stop at bitterness. Bitterness is only one of the many flavors his poetry can offer. And there is one more that must be discussed—sadness.

        For instance, let’s take a look at the first poem, “There.” The fact that “cheerfulness” appears twice in such a short poem might lead us to imagine the speaker’s cheerful face, but the speaker’s attitude as he greets his father’s ashes “as cheerfully as possible” isn’t so simple. At the most basic level, the there where the speaker’s father resides must be the charnel house that holds his ashes, but ultimately this there is a place that cannot be reached by the living. Only in death does it become a part of one’s lived (?) experience. It is a place that can’t be approached by the language of life, but which we yearn to speak to, if only in life’s language. The speaker doesn’t want to say anything particularly special. Just a cheerful phrase like, “I’ve been doing well.” Or a word of grief, sadness, or longing that he’s been holding back with cheerfulness. The thought that he’ll be headed there one day too. The promise to live with “precipitously overflowing cheerfulness” if only for the sake of his father, who departed first for “that far off day.” Reading over poems steeped in this feeling, we realize why this poetry collection overflowing with pronouns had to be titled The Pronoun for Nothingness. And it is the poet’s foreword that reminds us of the foundation of loss and absence that sustains  the collection: “In the place of loss, there was is.”

        As long as we live, “Nothingness will forever knock on former somethingness” (“Those”). This “former somethingness” not only refers to a past presence, but also strongly suggests that all presence is momentary. No one can escape the fate of staying for only a moment before moving on. And once we recognize that this moment of presence is premised on absence, all the pronouns in these poems suddenly read as if they refer back to absence. We realize that, as we go through life naming, memorizing, and forgetting the names for things, the pronouns that accompany us can ultimately only refer to nothing—nonrelation, namelessness. And we accept the bitter but unmistakable fact that, even in our way of referring to the that, there, and then which can only be called nothingness, human knowledge can’t help but rely on a pronoun. There’s no other way; all we can do is call it what it is. There, at the final destination of life, is that. Sometime, you will be there, as will I.

Translated by Seth Chandler

Kim Un is the author of the poetry collections including One Sentence, Your Unknowable Heart, and To the Blank Page, and the essay collection Everyone Holds a Sentence in the Heart, the poetics collection Poetry Does Not Speak of Parting, the literary criticism collection Beyond the Writing of Violence and Allure, and the reader’s memoir, Reading Old Books. He has received the Midang Literary Award, Park In-Hwan Literary Award, Kim Hyeon Prize, and Daesan Literary Award. He is currently a professor at the School of Creative Writing, Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Korean WORK Mentioned:
• Oh Eun, The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)

1     Translator’s Note: This is a play on the Korean words “uri” (辦葬 – we, us) and “yuri” (嶸葬 – isolated, separated, divided) which are near homophones/homographs, further suggesting the inherent divisions within any us. I’ve attempted to translate this through the visual similarity of “we” and “wrenched,” but the effect is difficult to reproduce.