who once showed him the way,
gave her that name.
Unsure of the day of her birth,
let alone the hour,
she grew up
a very pretty girl,
became a really beautiful young woman,
of such loveliness as is rarely found
even in distant lands –
Portugal, say,
or Sweden.
The Widow in the Central Market
She’s known as the Generalissima of the dried fish booths
in Seongdong-gu’s Central Market.
If the woman in the next booth over
plays the coquette with a customer,
she cries out, ‘Bloody bitch, gone mad again.
She’s mad to do what she does by night
again in broad daylight.’
When the Generalissima shrieks,
all shut their mouths, Shhhh!
in the dried fish booths,
in the fruit stalls beyond,
in the fresh fish shops,
no matter who’s in the wrong.
It’s like driest dust being driven from furrows by a strong wind.
Covered by thick awnings,
no sunshine enters the market all day long.
She seizes every opportunity
to squeal like a sow having its throat cut,
cursing her dead husband:
‘That goddamn heel, croaked first,
making all this trouble for me, the bastard.’
When it rains, water pools on the awning
then cascades down over her:
‘That goddamn Heaven,
goddamn God!’
When people buy dried fish from the Generalissima
for their family memorial rites,
their ancestors’ appetites are aroused.
Since the 1970s, cocks seem to crow any time they want,
so the spirits of ancestors can’t make out
when exactly it’s time to leave;
it’s only right, then, that their descendants
should at least arouse their appetites.
Gongju Dawdler
‘I hate that song most, “The dawn bell has rung…”
the Saemaeul Song,* I hate that most.’
There was a time you had to be ready to be arrested
if you said something like that.
Even speaking such words took too long.
Such is the dawdling dialect of Chungcheong province.
It’s not just in speaking.
Rising
from sitting
takes a long, long time, too.
When they go to Seoul from Daejeon station
they are sure to take the slow train,
which stops at every station,
at every station.
‘What would I take
a fast train for?’
When they cross the street,
they slowly start to cross
after coughing three or four times
long after all the other people have crossed.
If a companion urges them on:
‘What do you hurry for
so much?
If you hurry, even the rice isn’t properly cooked.
‘Look at the moon
at night.
It moves
slowly,
slowly,
as if not moving at all.
‘If we live by minutes and seconds, we’re done for.
It’s the same with living by hours.
‘Therefore we must have
a night
like half a day, like
early evening,
night,
and early dawn
when the cockerel comes late to the first flap of its wings.
What are you thinking?’
* Song of the New Village (Saemaeul) Movement during the Park Jung-hee era.
The Man in Tapgol Park
Tapgol Park,
a place crowded with elderly folk,
where old men
covered in age spots
grab one another by the collar and sort of fight,
ah!.. there he is.
Mansu Coffee Shop
on a side-street in Cheongjin-dong, Seoul,
a place crowded with elderly folk
…there he is.
A place where the elderly roll walnuts in their palms,
sinews squirming on the backs of their hands,
a place where they talk about everything,
shouting this
and that,
and pinch the buttocks of the girl serving coffee,
…there he is.
He’s a young man of thirty,
but when asked why he comes here
he says it’s the only place he feels comfortable;
when asked his age,
he says he’s sixty-five.
They say he was forced to do military service
after he lied about his age,
and his mind was affected
after a beating by a superior in the barracks,
so he was discharged on medical grounds,
and mentally he is old and mad.
Could be so:
the Tang genius, the poet Li Ho, wrote that
at twenty a man is already old.
Father and Son
The father, Shin Gil-ho was 51,
the son, Shin Haeng-bok, 26.
The father had six convictions for larceny,
the son had four convictions for larceny.
In prison, a convict who is penniless is known as dog hair,
while one who cashes promissory notes
or cheques is called tiger hair.
Dog-hair father and son
were assigned to different cells,
but after supper,
with difficulty, they communicated
through a little barred window in the back.
From the father’s third theft
the son
had followed in his father’s footsteps.
What they said:
Did you eat enough?
Yes, Dad.
Rub the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet a lot.
And don’t skip rubdowns with a cold towel.
Yes, all right, son.
The father, with his shining, prematurely bald head,
murmured to himself:
My boy, I know nothing else about him,
but he’s the most filial son in the country.
Jeong Hwa-am
Moving secretly through many parts of China,
he devoted himself to the independence movement in his fatherland.
Along with his devotion and tenacity, he was cautious,
so he survived and came back home.
Even back home, prison was his politics.
His fatherland,
the Korean peninsula
where the sea on three sides can never be calm,
was always the land he dreamed of.
He passed fifty,
sixty,
seventy.
With reality so bleak, even dreaming was hard.
He rejected all honors.
Belief was his only politics.
Even a 40-watt light in a dreary cell
was an utterly vain dream to him
each day when he awoke.
He was no reality, he was a legend.
As if modern history were ancient history,
Jeong Hwa-am endured, white-haired.
The Shit Clan
I have three surnames.
In this land
where changing surnames is one of the greatest humiliations,
I have three or four surnames.
In Japan there is a surname Gui,
meaning ghost,