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Two Poems by Jin Eun-young scrap

by Jin Eun-younggo link Translated by Hedgie Choigo link December 14, 2022

Author Bio 작가 소개

진은영

Jin Eun-young

Jin Eun-young is a poet and publisher. She debuted as poet in 2000 when her poems were published in the spring issue of Literature and Society. She teaches literary counselling at the Korea Counseling Graduate University. Her poetry collections include A Dictionary of Seven Words, We, Day by Day, I Love You Like an Old Street, and more. Her works in translation include We, Day by Day (White Pine Press, 2018). She has translated Sylvia Plath’s novel Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom into Korean.

Pity about That Principle of Sufficient Reason



Without reason my heart – a red swimming tube adrift in the middle of the sea 

Without reason I waited for you at the overpass, in front of the pharmacy, under the chariot

Without reason I secretly hated a bunch of people

Without reason the wind blows a paper leaf toward me

Reasonless like the traveler’s bag with twelve paths in it, the shoes in the muck


Without reason the balloon wants to fly clinging to the line of a sentence

Without reason the rich get rich, the machines churn, spinning their limbs

Without reason the concrete ceilings crumble like freshly baked pie 

Without reason the Children’s Day cotton candy is wet with redness

Reasonless the sadness followed them babbling like a stream

     The children and the elderly, the women and the men, the dogs and cats of all colors 

Without reason the coloring practice that tries not go outside the lines of nothingness

Without reason I wanted to disappear in style

Without reason I was reborn in the mouth of sufficient reason

Without reason all the reasons that arrive too late at each place

     shine in the garden deep in the night while everyone sleeps, like the thorns on a glow-in-the-dark rose 

     without reason – 





Freedom to Write



No places in the universe are the same

The heart – a fruit that turns a different color each day

The place we surrendered each other

Try using the blue scissors, when you cut paper


It feels good

I put brackets around the questions that are wrong

[Let’s keep the false answers as friendship]


Husserl said, Epoche

It’s okay to not know, you glue it together, you can cut it apart

You stand there holding the empty bag

What’s not in here that it’s this heavy


[Messily] glue it together

[Crookedly] you can cut it

[As is] it stays – like a tissue bloodied

 

 

by Jin Eun-young

Translatedby Hedgie Choi 

Writer 필자 소개

Jin Eun-young

Jin Eun-young

Jin Eun-young is a poet and publisher. She debuted as poet in 2000 when her poems were published in the spring issue of Literature and Society. She teaches literary counselling at the Korea Counseling Graduate University. Her poetry collections include A Dictionary of Seven Words, We, Day by Day, I Love You Like an Old Street, and more. Her works in translation include We, Day by Day (White Pine Press, 2018). She has translated Sylvia Plath’s novel Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom into Korean.

Translator 번역가 소개

Hedgie Choi

Hedgie Choi

Hedgie Choi is a poet, writer, and translator based in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin and her MFA in fiction from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Salvage, a poetry collection.

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