3 Poems by 이제니 Lee Jenny
By 이제니 Lee Jenny Translated from Korean by Archana Madhavan
Only the Fluttering Sound of Falling Leaves
In the end, it’s only the fluttering sound of falling leaves. Starting today, I’ll stop feeling remorseful. Starting today, I’ll stop feeling remorseful about my remorse. But your notepad’s gotten as thin as thin can be, the spiral set to spring. That’s how I am. I can’t reflect on myself without writing. Remorse is a longtime habit of yours, as old as the history of your murmurs. You close your mouth. You are weary. You are deserving of feeling weary.
Our only mistake is thinking of each other’s names as proper nouns. I decide that if you look at me like you are about to cry, I will choose between the two of us. Between you disappearing and me disappearing. But you, with your back turned to me, write words of unknown meaning on the window. Naturally, I can’t see your words. Had it been winter with wispy breaths passing through our lips, someone would have discovered the loneliness of your existence like you had wanted.
When does winter even start? Is winter even on its way? I grumble and grumble in a low voice, pretending to get angry. With your back turned to me, your shoulders continue to heave. The letters on the window vanish as soon as they are written. Goodbye, farewell. Goodbye, farewell. Same here. So this is how different our goodbyes are. You heave, heave. Your shoulders heave.
In a breakup, the kinder one is the one who loved less. Knowing that, I pretended, pretended, pretended to be kind. I pretended to be the kinder one so many times. Goodbye, farewell. Goodbye, farewell. The rest is only words that cannot be spoken. In the end, it’s only the fluttering sound of falling leaves.
Shadow’s Mouth
You, always with an ashen tongue, with an ashen voice. We no longer ask anything about each other. In order to call it a misunderstanding to not understand, in order to call it an understanding to not misunderstand. From then on we swallowed up questionnaires about each other. From then on we only talked about dreams. Holding onto a blank sheet of paper with countless words written on it, putting dream is the opposite word in parenthesis.
A fish with the name of a bird, a bird with the name of a fish. The word mournful brings to mind a winged beast. After we separated wings from gills slowly we grew apart from each other, only in our dreams did we devote ourselves to calling them both by one name.
Like touching each other’s hands and feet, writing only about themselves
About the temperature at which sound becomes music
About the pureness of sound not becoming music
A line by a cursed poet whose dates of birth and death are unknown and an unidentified shadow wearing a black cap and seven of my fingers that I left in a tunnel and the way triangles pierce me and birds with blue feet and a wound on a tree trunk and a dying star and a surreal flower and
I went through several mistakes and returned outside the mouth. There was no one waiting. The time following embalmed long and transparent glass bottle days.
Instead of not violating the murmurs in each other’s mouths the extra paper was stained with darkness, and when we awoke from sleep we only talked about a dream we did not remember.
A Bird Without Legs
Youth is all orphan. When I am wet with early morning dew and bury my face in the sky the breeze has still not arrived. Where should we go now? What should we do now? Anywhere anywhere anything anything. Youth is all orphan. It wanders like a breeze that does not arrive. I am a bird without legs. A blazing life does not suit me. Where did all the buttons that fell off my collar go? I think of you who are like an empty buttonhole. They went to you then returned to me like a breeze that can only pass in and out of a tiny hole. We are infinitely round infinitely swollen and at the slightest thing we’ll burst into tears. Textureless volumeless we’ll keep flying up. Are square corners allowed in a life that lacks definition? I need a place to lean against and rest. I need an angled place. I need a small space to fold up my body and sprawl out. Even better if it’s a small casket made of wood. I’ll lie down there and sleep a dreamlike sleep. I’ll dream a sleeplike dream. As I open and shut my eyes I’ll see what I’m floating toward. Everyone is born once and dies once. People who want to be born again even though they were born once. People who want to die again even after dying once. People who can’t properly be born, who can’t properly die. Youth is all orphan. It advances and retreats like a yearning wandering through a maze. It multiplies to infinity like an uneasiness roiling within one’s words. Where did my two feet go? It involves an unknowable height. Sometimes height gets mistaken for depth. Can you sing a temperature that cannot be reached? Can you prize a temperature that cannot be reached? Our answers always start with a question and end with a question. Youth is all orphan. Useless metaphors carve into my forehead. Sentences pile up that have no use anywhere. In the name of things that offer no comfort, I endure time.
About the author and translator:
Lee Jenny is a South Korean poet. She made her literary debut with the poem “Peru” in 2008, which won her the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer’s Award. She has since published four poetry collections, the most recent of which include 있지도 않은 문장은 아름답고 (The Sentence That Doesn’t Even Exist Still Is Beautiful And, Hyundae Munhak, 2019) and 그리하여 흘려 쓴 것들 (Scribbles I Thus Spilled, Moonji, 2019). She was awarded the Pyeon-un Literature Award for excellence in poetry and the Kim Hyeon Prize in 2011 and 2016, respectively. Most recently, in 2021, Lee received the Hyundae Munhak Prize. Lee is known for lyricism, rhythm, and wordplay in her work; critics have likened her poetry to incanting a spell.
Archana Madhavan is a literary translator from Korean into English, who also juggles a career in the tech industry. Her first book-length work is a co-translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Her other poetry and prose translations have appeared in Modern Poetry In Translation, Nabillera, The Puritan, Korean Literature Now, and are forthcoming elsewhere. In 2022, Archana was selected as a mentee for The American Literary Translators Association’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program to translate poetry from Lee Jenny’scollection 아마도 아프리카 (Maybe Africa, Changbi, 2010). She resides in San José, California.
