In his foreword to Kim Haengsook’s Human Time, editor Jake Levine mostly addresses the unusual—but, as he takes pains to make clear, not-unheard-of—circumstances of production of this brilliant anthology: the fact that it is the work of not one or two translators, but rather a “crowded kitchen” of them (to borrow his analogy). All in all, seven co-translators—Léo-Thomas Brylowski, Hannah Hertzog, Susan K, Jiyoon Lee, Joanne Park, Soeun Seo, and Soohyun Yang—have been implicated in a process that Levine describes as “communal workshopping.” Even as Levine quickly runs through the different kinds of good that might come of “interpreting and translating together,” he acknowledges that the Anglophone world as it stands may not be open to this form of translatorly collaboration. Case in point: Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, which was also translated by many people in 2019, was deemed ineligible for most of the prizes that year (“No one knows who added the salt and lime,” goes Levine’s hypothesis. “No master chef to worship.”). Should this change?

     It is this reviewer’s opinion that not only should such translations be welcomed; they can and should be judged alongside other translations.

     As an English title, Human Time certainly holds its own next to other poetry collections in the world literature canon—and I also mean those that specifically treat time as metaphysical subject. Etel Adnan’s Time (which, in Sarah Riggs’s translation, won the 2020 Griffin International Poetry Prize) comes to mind. Though her work invokes and sometimes appropriates from a whole cast of Western artists (most notably Kafka, but also featuring Orwell, Jodorowsky, Duchamp, Goethe, and possibly Hemingway), Kim’s vision is singularly imaginative, streaked with a genius that sets her apart.

     Here is Kim on the painful awareness of loss that is forever waiting in the wings: “Like a huge, busting sac of pus / this world is so beautiful it frightens me.” And how does Kim describe her coping mechanism? With her “Goodbye Ability peaking,” she reimagines herself as Kafka having to take a “55-kilogram shit”—but until she absolutely has to take that dump and disappear, she wants to “[hold] it in, frantically writing everything that must be written.”

     Kim’s insistence on specificity is a sometime feature of her obsessive craft. For example, it is not simply a big shit she has to take, but a “55-kilogram” one. Elsewhere, she describes pain that is “30, 40, 50 centimeters” from her body; “72 ways to take a walk”; people below the decimal point (a certain 0.01 “lying on the street”). Yet, some of her most bracing poetry is given to us entirely in broad brushstrokes, with the irrefutable logic and power of haiku. Consider the opening of “APRIL 16, 1914”: “It’s the date of my birth. / I’m a person who still hasn’t died, so / I’m a person with many dead friends.” It’s been said that a good writer is not just a master of specificity; she also knows when it is called for.

     Most of the poems in this collection are prose poems, including a pair of set pieces that are three-pages long; around two-fifths are free verse of the shorter kind. Intellectual rigor aside, I was struck by how many of these poems reverberate with one another across dueling motifs of transparency vs. opacity, inside vs. outside (and, perhaps related to that, being exiled at the periphery vs. being ensconced “in the deep”). And thanks to the impressive skills of these translators as a group, many of the works enter into lucid conversation with one another, deepening in meaning and consequence. If I had any reservation at all, it was the feeling that the collection could stand to be slightly more whittled, notwithstanding my general enjoyment of the work, which remains immense.

     I think Human Time gives us a tour de force introduction to a major talent in contemporary Korean poetry and for that alone, I hope translation prize committees around the world might set aside any reservations about the work being a product of multiple translators and give this collection a fair shake. Don’t dismiss the work simply because it is the product of so much labor and care (the result isn’t always groupthink when more than two collaborate on a project). Think instead of how many versions each of these poems must have survived—across multiple leaps of imagination and understanding—to arrive inside this magnificent collection.

 

 

 

Lee Yew Leong

Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor, Asymptote