Being Drunk Is a Dream

Sin Yong-Mok
Translated from the Korean

Somebody threw a stone.Wasn’t my head the bit of air that got broken off?Isn’t the hole pierced in the world my thoughts?Since every kind of silence leaked out through that round holewe’re drunk.Like light suspended from streetlights without fallingit’s dreadful.Thinking.Like a knife blade bending near the heartthat a stone wound round with life’s blood vesselsriskily left turned on . . .I’m killing as much as is necessary.Fortunately, today the drink is clearso if I moisten the body’s wicklike a spring wound up till it breaksit will always be night. Is night just the flash of a gigantic stone passing?Might dreams be the forest where that stone falls?Because anything can return where it came frombut not in the same way it arrived, thereforethoughts do not heal.Something we can’t possess is wingsand what a bird can’t possess is a wish to fly.Because of its wingsa bird falls from the airand because we want to flywe fall endlessly from where we stand.Someone never stops talking.It’s not because I say I want to fly that I can’t fly.It’s not because I say I can’t fly that I don’t want to fly.We came flying.Like thoughts.Like thoughts.When one stone blazeslike a crimson heart at the tip of the knife that strikes itemitting black smokelike rain driving into the hole suspended above the throatlike sorrowI’m dying as much as is necessary. Did you realize?Holes break, too.One body, not breaking, an everlasting ground . . .One daywaking from sleep like a window breakingtaking my head in my handsa pebble that came flying long ago gets caught andtears go spreading like cracks.

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Headshot of Sin Yong-Mok

Born in Geochang, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea, Sin Yong-Mok received a new writers award in 2000 and has published six collections of poetry, a novel, and a volume of prose essays. He is currently assistant professor of creative writing at Chosun University.

Brother Anthony of Taizé has lived in Korea since 1980 and has published over fifty volumes of English translations of contemporary Korean poetry in addition to a considerable number of translations of Korean fiction and other books related to Korea. He is an emeritus professor at Sogang University and a chair professor at Dankook University and president emeritus of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch.

Boston, Massachusetts

A debut English-language collection of hopeful and carefully attentive poems by one of South Korea’s most lauded young poets.

This collection offers a selection of poems from Sin Yong-mok’s earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his evolution as a poet, alongside a complete translation of the poems from his fourth collection, When Someone Called Someone, I Looked Back. Beautifully translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé with close attention to the sonorous aspects of Sin’s lines, this collection also captures the larger themes within Shin’s work and his attention to the spirit of community and peaceful coexistence with others. These are poems with a powerful belief in humanity and the beauty of the smallest hopes.

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