As a long-time fan, it’s an honor to interview a poet whose work I’ve followed so closely. I’m aware you’ve had some big changes in your life recently. Going from Seoul to Gwangju is a big move. The scenery outside your office window must have changed a great deal as well. I’m curious how the new office looks, where you’ve placed your new desk. Could you set the scene for us?

I always put my desk next to the window. The view from my previous office was a concrete jungle, a bunch of new apartments, but now I have some old trees and a forest outside the window. I like old things, things that are getting old. I’ve been pretty happy with everything, but there were some difficulties at first. The sunlight is so strong. When you’re in the middle of the city, the shadows of the tall buildings act like a curtain for most of the day. But here, maybe because we’re a bit higher up on the mountainside, it’s so bright and hot during the day that I couldn’t sit at my desk. One wall is entirely taken up by a window, but since this office was vacant for two years, there weren’t any blinds for the first week. Whenever I sat down to write, I’d start muttering to myself about the brightness. I couldn’t wait for the blinds to be installed.

      Then I got these charcoal rolling shades that were so dark they completely blocked out the sunlight. When the shades were down, you could develop a photograph inside the office, like a darkroom. It was so dark it was suffocating, and I was still muttering under my breath about the lighting. Then I tore some pictures out of an old art magazine and stuck them up on that wall of light, like patches of stained glass. I just stuck them up anywhere, so they took the edge off the sunlight, and the view outside was still visible through the thin pages. I’ve had a lot of repair workers and technicians and other people coming and going because it’s an old office and needs some work done. Sometimes I wonder if they think it’s weird when they come in and see those loose scraps of paper stuck up all over that big, beautiful window.

      I think that’s how literature and art have always been for me. Figuring out my own way to resolve some kind of lighting issue. I need light to live, but if the light gets too intense, I feel like I might kill somebody. But when I take some sentences and start loosely sticking them together, the light peeking out between the lines protects me. It helps me grow and bloom.

You majored in philosophy before going on to lecture at Korea Counseling Graduate University (KCGU), exploring literature’s power to heal. Alongside this, you’ve done work in translation as well. From a distance, philosophy, counseling, and translation are three distinct fields, but it seems like they all revolve around the central axis of poetry, which draws them in together. Does poetry play different roles in each of these fields? What is similar or different about poetry as a part of philosophy, of counseling, or of translation?

I suppose I have been doing a bit of all three for the past ten years now. Objectively, it’s been just as you described—poetry as a part of philosophy, as a part of psychological counseling, as a part of translation. Yet in my heart I think it feels the other way around—philosophy as a part of poetry, counseling as a part of poetry, translation as a part of poetry.

      I’ve told this story elsewhere, but I was a math and science student in high school. I majored in philosophy because of an older student’s advice that a good poet must be well-versed in philosophy. These days, I often tell my students about Baudelaire’s dream of creating new clichés. It’s every poet’s dream to create a single word, a single expression that’s never been said before, but which then becomes so well-used that it turns into a cliché. But this isn’t simply a desire to create a novel phrase that everyone loves. The poet aspires to present the world with a gift: the gift of a new, different world. It may be a world for those who delight in the small and trivial, or it may be something more massive, but we all have this ambition. It is philosophy that allows us to imagine the world we will call forth, to think through and reflect upon the precise way to approach that world. Therefore, all poets study philosophy. Of course, our methods of study differ. Since I majored in philosophy, I take a more exegetical or argumentative approach within the philosophy discourse, but others seem to think philosophically by examining and reflecting upon their own writing.

      Counseling as a part of poetry has been with me ever since I started writing poems. The high school I went to was trying to make a name for itself as the new, elite college test-prep school in the neighborhood, so they had no arts and literature track. The atmosphere was like, if you got caught reading one of the classics during study hall, you could expect corporal punishment. I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy literature as much as I’d have liked, but I learned through experience that when I was depressed and exhausted, just reading a poem to myself, mouthing it under my breath, made me feel so much better. In other words, reading and writing poetry was a kind of self-therapy for me. Weak, tender things will always find a way to make a little hole to hide in, right? This world is so full of weak, tender things that it feels like a sponge, so full of little holes. In twelve years at KCGU, reading and writing poetry with all sorts of students, I’ve really come to think so. Some drill their hole with sound, some with color, some with love. Each of us can hide in a hole drilled by art and humanity. When it’s not reading or listening but writing and performing, perhaps it’s less like drilling and more like nibbling a hole with the incisors of letters and music. You have to gnaw the hole open and shape it yourself, so it’s not easy at first, but we all have incisors.

      I think of translation as a kind of training in earnestly and carefully approaching something unfamiliar to you. I began translating because I wanted to know more about the poet Sylvia Plath, who lived in a world I knew so little about. “Please just get divorced and start a new life!” That’s what I used to say to my mom when I was a child, starting when I was in the upper grades of elementary school. So it was a struggle for me to understand women who cry out in anguish while staying in an unhappy marriage. Whenever we hear a scream, no matter whose it is, we have an immediate reaction, “Oh my god. Someone’s in pain. Shouldn’t we get them out of that situation?” But understanding someone means to know the specifics of their pain, and to know the deep-seated reason they’ve confined themself there. It means that even if you wouldn’t defend such a life, you accept that for this other person, who’s different from you, it is their way of being, and they are in pain. And you don’t draw facile conclusions or judgments. When I translated Sylvia Plath’s poetry, I sat and thought over what this life I hadn’t lived might have been like. When I read her diaries and letters, I felt a little closer to that pain I hadn’t known. In this sense, writing a poem is like translating a piece of the world.

In the case of your own poetry, what do you think is most important when it’s translated and introduced in another language? It may be impossible to prevent things from being lost in the translation process, but is there anything you believe absolutely must be conveyed intact and without distortion?

The order of the words that make up the images. Even if the target language sentences don’t come out as smoothly, I’d like the order of the words to be kept as close to their positions in the source text as possible. It’s usually quite difficult to translate that way because word order is different, but I feel it’s the only way to convey the image that the poet is trying to show the reader.

The images in your poetry are so distinct that it feels like you must always have on your desk a scale for weighing words, a temperature gauge, and gem-cutting tools. The “new clichés” Baudelaire spoke of make their presence felt throughout your collections. I can feel the senses within my body become vividly awake when I imagine lines like “Like a snail’s eye, the gentle day” (“Birthday”) or “Like a little silver drum being played, your palm is tapped upon by the rain” (“Proposal”). It seems that images—the images you hope will be carried over as closely as possible and never be lost in translation—truly play an important role in your poetic world. The title of your recent prose collection is Although I’m Not Right for the World. As soon as I heard the title, I had the urge to complete the sentence and felt a very strong pull. What would it mean to be “just right for this world”? Is it even possible? What were the “someone’s sentences that saved [you]”? The book brought out so many questions. How do you understand the word “world”? What does it mean for us to be reading and writing there?

In a sense, I think the idea of being just right for this world is incredibly frightening. That makes it sound as if the world is a jigsaw puzzle where everyone will fit perfectly if they just find their place. I get a sense of compulsivity from that worldview. Even just one person not fitting in puts an end to such imaginings of the world as a jigsaw puzzle. After all, in a basic sense, the world is a concept meant to encompass everyone, so if even one piece doesn’t fit, the complete, single picture becomes impossible. And the number of people who don’t fit into this world is certainly more than one. In fact, almost everyone doesn’t fit. Each one of us is a differently-shaped piece, and one of my sides might match up to another of your sides—in the plural sense of you. There are always many gaps between the pieces. For instance, I like Hannah Arendt’s books, but I don’t really like the stories about her love affairs. When she was a student, she had a relationship with Heidegger, who was her philosophy professor, and she met him again sometime much later. When he got sulky that her work was more popular than his in America, do you know what she said? She remarked that he’d been under the impression she couldn’t even count to three. When I read that in one of the biographies, I was shocked. How could these be the words of such a brave and critical female philosopher? How could she have fallen in love with a man who treated her like she was so stupid she couldn’t count to three? She’s not a match for me. But no, then again, she is a match for me. When I sense her idealizing Greek culture, she’s not a match for me. When she’s unrestrained in her criticism of Zionism, she is a match.

      Writing is the work of creating contact so that these temporary and partial matches arise. Literature seems to have the ability to take parts and pieces that have always been so far apart they’d never bump into each other and magnetize them together. Right now, we’re connected. But we could fall apart. But that’s okay. We can be reconnected again. Of course, this process isn’t always as easy or pleasant as it sounds, but good works of literature always bring me some relief through the knowledge that these moments of contact and rupture aren’t only happening to me.

Your books often introduce readers to quotes from foreign authors. Your first collection Seven Word Dictionary includes quotes from Nicanor Parra, Louis Aragon, and Rainer Maria Rilke; We, Day by Day from Pasternak, Nietzsche, and Spinoza; Stolen Song from Maurice Blanchot, César Vallejo, and Antonio Muñoz Molina. I Love You Like an Old Street opens with a line from a Zbigniew Herbert poem, “Those touched by misfortune are always alone,” and then lines from John Berger, Dylan Thomas, and Emily Dickinson open each section. All four of your poetry collections have three parts, each beginning with a quote from a foreign writer, so it seems this format has become a distinctive characteristic of your work as a poet. Do you plan on keeping this format for your next collection? Is there a reason you like to draw on quotes? What are your thoughts on these lines from other writers?

It isn’t intentional. It might just be that I write too little, so it’s hard to pull together a collection with more than three parts. The lines I use as epigraphs are all lines that I love, of course. An epigraph usually appears at the beginning of a piece of writing to indicate the topic or theme, so it’s meant to suggest to readers the mood or thematic concerns I had when the poems were written or collected. I’m saying, “Here’s what I’ll be talking about.” But the reason I’m so attached to that style is really more of an intense and fundamental desire to read the quoted books together with those who would befriend me. It’s as if I want to say, “There is a more beautiful and dazzling world out there than the one I’ve captured in this book. I know there is!” Just as a road connects to other roads in endless procession, I hope the words of other writers quoted in my books will serve as a key to open the door to those writers’ books, in continuous connection to yet other worlds.

I confess that, in my own reading, I’ve followed many of those quoted lines to the joy of discovering and falling in love with new authors I’d never heard of. Thanks to that experience, I’ve become a member of a reading community that transcends time and space. Since we’re on the topic, would you introduce us to any new works you’ve found recently, or any new meanings you’ve discovered in re-reading something? If not a specific work, I’m curious what sorts of things you’ve been reading. Any trends or keywords? I want to keep up with your thought.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the spirit of gift-giving. I wrote about this in my recent essay collection as well, but reading Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions led me to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I picked it up because Atwood strongly recommends it as required reading to young aspiring artists regardless of genre. It made me rethink what it means to engage in relationships openly rather than dually. In my twenties I thought of myself as someone who would repay a kindness no matter what it took. Whatever love I received from someone, I thought I would give back even more. It made me feel proud to think like that. I think it was a kind of psychological strategy to accept that I was indebted to someone else’s love to sustain my existence. But as time went by, I could never sufficiently pay back all the people who’d given me love, and those people never expected a reward either. With love and kindness, giving back only when you’ve received and taking only when you’ve given is fundamentally a kind of exchange relation. As Hyde points out in his book, not only will that not change the world, the world couldn’t even function properly that way. Without the bountiful gifts which the sun gives to plants, and which plants give to us, we couldn’t even exist. But I don’t compensate the sun that’s shining down warmly on me right now, nor the delicious plants that I’m chewing on.

      On days when I feel alone, I get great strength and consolation from the words of Szymborska, Herbert, Bachmann, and Berger, but it’s not as if I can write works as great as theirs to move and console them in return. There is no way to compensate them. All that you and I can do, as poets, is write and do our best to offer a single line as a gift to give someone else courage on a day when they are struggling. When I think of how gifts keep passing onward to other places in that way, flowing endlessly among many people rather than back and forth between just two, I feel much more generous. In my twenties, I was very fearful of inconveniencing or becoming indebted to someone. To myself, I insisted this was because I was a strong, independent person, but really it was because I couldn’t accept our fundamental vulnerability, our ultimate dependence on others. But reading Hyde’s argument of the gift economy as a kind of universal flow—one that may appear to have been cut off by capitalism since the modern era, but which in fact can’t be severed so long as the cycle of life continues on Earth—I felt my own dark anxiety about the future lift and brighten. I want to live like a plant. Vegetarians eat plants but not animals, despite the fact that both are living things. I’ve heard it explained that the ability of plants to give gifts is greater than that of animals. Lettuce and herbs grow back quickly even if we pick a leaf for breakfast. Plants can preserve themselves even as they share with other beings. It’s said the Buddha returned in one life as a rabbit and offered up his body to feed a hungry tiger, but since even thinking about such dedication and sacrifice could be too much for us, let’s try to live like the plants, which preserve the self even as they give freely of the self as a gift. I’ve been trying to view whatever comes my way in the new, generous perspective of a plant.

I wish I could be more like a plant as well, with that gift-giving ability. But in the world of capital, where almost everything is quantitatively assessed and exchanged, it occurs to me that self-preservation isn’t as easy as one might think. In other words, whatever that thing is—the thing you’re most afraid to lose, the self you want to preserve no matter what—if you want to hold onto it, you have to be so reactive and cling to it with all your might. I wonder what that thing—the self—is for you, whether in poetry or in life.

When I spoke of self-preservation, I wasn’t thinking of a self that exists as some fixed characteristic. On the contrary, when I speak of preserving the self, what I mean is sustaining a passion for reinventing the self through ceaseless contact with the world. If we think of a stem sprouting from a seed or leaves budding on a branch, we can feel a kind of passion rising ever outward from the self and toward something else. Of course, this passion isn’t truly everlasting. We can’t preserve the self infinitely. Everything comes to an end. But until then, I hope I will always retain within me the ability to transform the self by taking small steps towards other beings. I remember a line from The Gift: “We stand before a […] burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf.” The author is watching a wooden house burn down, and it feels to him as if the trees are returning all the light they’ve taken in back to the world—it’s quite an epiphany. Of course, when we then see forests burning for months on end, the first worry that comes to mind is the climate crisis. It’s as if the trees are engaging in a great self-immolation, a stern rebuke of humanity for taking everything from nature and never offering any gift in return.

I Love You Like An Old Street often brought to mind the faces and expressions of death. There are many different keywords by which to read your poetry, but I’d venture that one important foundation of your poetic world is loss and mourning. In your essay “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person,” you write that after a loved one dies, our “way of loving” them changes, and you say that we need another “experiment in love,” quoting Megan Devine. That left an impression on me. In our times, what is the shape of love required by a community of sadness? Tell us more about your thoughts on loss, mourning, and love’s extension.

Actually, in your poem “Incomplete”, you write that “to cross the valley, what’s needed is not two legs,” but “a buttonhole-sized belief is enough.” I like those lines. What is the buttonhole-sized belief we need in order to cross the valley of death? Could it be the belief that we are still connected? A sense of connection, that we are still in touch with the dead. Megan Devine’s observation that when a loved one dies, love isn’t over, but the way we love them changes, means that we are still connected to them, but the way we are connected is different. When I teach Heidegger’s Being and Time, I tell my students about his concept of death’s singularity, but actually, when I think of my own personal experience and the people around me who’ve lost loved ones, it seems that death can’t truly separate us. Loss is always the loss of one part of a person. Not the whole. We’ve lost their body. Of course, this loss is fatally, violently painful. We can no longer see or touch them. But we haven’t lost everything. We continue to feel and remember their being as we love them. This is why John Berger says absence is not nothingness. Their being is with us. In contrast, a person who is still alive and breathing, but with whom we have no connection, is so much further away from us than the dead, so much closer to nothingness. If we hold on to this small belief—that we are connected, that we must be connected, this buttonhole-sized belief—we can continue to remember and record our loved ones who’ve crossed into death. And we can also avoid excluding, neglecting, and turning away from our living and breathing neighbors.

      One of the reasons I like your phrase “buttonhole-sized belief” is that it’s connected in my mind to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Buttons.” The poem is set in a dense forest, where the truth of a tragic massacre of young military officers forty years earlier has finally come to light. Because so much time has passed, their bodies have grown soft, and even their uniforms are worn and frayed, but the buttons alone rise from the earth where they’re buried, now threaded into the forest, and bear witness to their existence. I felt a jolt of surprise to think of buttons so hard and resolute, fastening together the twin lapels of existence, life and death. A button can never be independent. Its being bears witness to connection in and of itself. A buttonhole is even smaller than a button, yet it is the necessary condition that allows the button to fasten to some other being, or for something to connect to a button, like the empty hole of our existence. We must believe that there are always a few more holes to connect you and me, in order to work toward that connection.

I suppose that’s the button that connects the two of us as well. I wish I could hold it tight in my hand as I drift off to sleep. It’s one of a kind, a button of warmth. And now we’ve arrived at our last question. How do feel about the word “future”? What steps are you taking, and in what direction, for the work ahead?

I don’t think I can say I’m an optimist. But since you’re the one asking, I’d like to give a warmhearted answer. Let’s imagine an enormous coat to heat up this ice-cold world. On that coat would be an infinity of buttons. How could I make such an enormous coat myself? When you feel that sense of desperation, focus on just a single button. That button is fastened to the coat, so as long as you have that one thing, you’re connected to the world. Recently, I was reading a book by Rebecca Solnit in which she explains that the slogan “the personal is political” originally meant that the social structure defining individuals is so much more powerful than each person’s individual life that individualistic understandings are impossible. I agree deeply, but it occurs to me that the most vivid way to approach that structure is to focus on the pain of someone you know. In other words, when we can properly connect with their pain, we are releasing or fastening one of the buttons that can save the world. I hope to do so through poetry.

Translated by Seth Chandler

KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:

•   Jin Eun-young, Although I’m Not Right for the World (Maum Sanchaek, 2024)

    진은영, 『나는 세계와 맞지 않지만』 (마음산책, 2024)

•   Jin Eun-young, Seven Word Dictionary (Moonji, 2003)

    진은영, 『일곱 개의 단어로 된 사전』 (문학과지성사, 2003)

•   Jin Eun-young, We, Day by Day (tr. Daniel Parker and YoungShil Ji, White Pine Press, 2018)

    진은영, 『우리는 매일매일』 (문학과지성사, 2008)

•   Jin Eun-young, Stolen Song (Changbi 2012)

    진은영, 『훔쳐가는 노래』 (창비, 2012)

•   Jin Eun-young, I Love You Like an Old Street (Moonji, 2022)

    진은영, 『나는 오래된 거리처럼 너를 사랑하고』 (문학과지성사, 2022)

•   Jin Eun-young, “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person” (Monthly Munhakdongne No. 114)

    진은영, 『허공 속의 슬픈 사람』 (문학동네 계간지 114호)

•   An Heeyeon, “Incomplete,” Walking in the Carrot Patch (Munhakdongne, 2024)

    안희연, 「미결」, 『당근밭 걷기』 (문학동네, 2024)

An Heeyeon began her poetic career in 2012 when she was awarded the Changbi New Poets Award. Her poetry collections include When Your Sorrow Cuts in, Within What is Called Night, What I Learned on the Summer Hill, and Walking in the Carrot Patch. She has also published prose collections, including House of Words and When You’re Loved, When Night Grows Deep. 

She was awarded the 2016 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.