How?
The flower print dress I forgot aboutgets caught on my fingers.How strange. That I used to wear something like this.I pull out more strange clothes and try them on.When I grab a kitchen knife to kill myselfI find a rice paddle in my hand.I shovel rice into my mouth with the paddle. And just like that,“Have you eaten?” asks my mom.I hang up.Why do we always have to talk about rice?These days I eat everything.Black soybeans, cotton swabs, drain cleaner, Saejol Station on the 8th at 3pm.Pay rent. 330,000 won.I jotted this on a Post-it so I wouldn’t forget.But I forget where I put it.Black soybeans in the refrigerator. Utterly, blackly, forgotten.Why do small sprouts grow on these rancid beans?Mom spreads her toast with moldy jam.“It’s still sweet.”Mom gulps expired milk.“It tastes just fine.”Whenever the words I want to die boil inside me.I scoop rice in my mouthjust like Mom.Mom must’ve held the rice paddle in her hand too.She must’ve reached for the rice paddle first thing in the morning.How come I can’t forget the taste of rice?How do the necks of flowers twisttogether towards the sun?How is wonder so gross?Again I clasp the broken watch on my wristand put on the flower print dress.I flop down into a flower gardenflowerless.
Feature Date
- September 29, 2022
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- Translation
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“How?” from GROTESQUE WEATHER AND GOOD PEOPLE: by Lim Solah.
Published by Black Ocean on June 21, 2022.
English Copyright © 2022 by Olan Munson and Oh Eunkyung.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Lim Solah is a writer from South Korea. She is the author of the novel The Best Life (Munhakdongnae 2015), poetry books Grotesque Weather and Good People (Munhakgwajiseongsa 2017), Get Packing (Hyeondaemunhak 2020), and the short story collection Snow, Person and Snowperson (Munhakdongnae 2019). Her work has received awards such as the JoongAng New Writer’s Award for Poetry, Munhakdongne College Fiction Prize, Sin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, and the Moonji Literary Award. Grotesque Weather and Good People (Black Ocean 2022) is available in English.
Oh Eunkyung and Olan Munson are freelance translators and graduates of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Based in Phnom Penh, Oh works to introduce contemporary Korean writers to an international readership. Munson is a PhD student in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. In 2017, they won the Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Commendation Award in fiction for their co-translation of Choi Eunyoung’s short story “Xin chào, Xin chào.” Their English translations of Lim Solah’s Grotesque Weather and Good People have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Salt Hill Journal, and Lana Turner.
Boston, Massachusetts
“Lim Solah is a rare poet-seer who looks so closely at creatures great and small that she plunges in and inhabits them. In doing so, her introspections take us face to face with the city of Seoul, full of gusto and disgust, showing us the best way to see something is to become it. A post-human prayer book, urban survivor’s guide, and primer on the meteorology of awareness, this is a tome of ecstasy—open only to those courageous enough to venture outside themselves.”
— Loren Goodman
“Lim Solah is a joyous, irreverent auteur whose remit remains unapologetically visionary: ‘I want to see a giraffe. I go to see a giraffe. // I fail to see a giraffe / so I make a giraffe.’ Quizzing the quiddities inside our everyday mundanities, here is a poet 'peep[ing] into the rifts in the air' ... Lim’s enchantments are incantatory responses, laboring playfully toward a powerfully estranging logic. Read these poems: see, sense, feel as if for a first time.”
— Dan Disney
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