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Two Poems by Kim Bok Hui scrap
by Kim Bok Hui
Translated by Jack Saebyok Jung
June 4, 2024
Author Bio 작가 소개
Kim Bok Hui
People Who Go to Hell Must Plant Flowers
In hell, you must plant flowers.
Should you plant them in sand or swamp?
No.
What about flowers that move?
No.
Flowers—
It doesn’t matter if the flowers are
beautiful or have thorns, if they
grow in vines, if they are
wilting or have
dried up.
You must plant without
knowing your surroundings, without
differentiating between day and night.
You must plant without feeling
tired even though you haven’t lain down, without
feeling hungry even though you haven’t eaten.
Bring one flower
and make sure it stands upright; bring
two flowers and make sure
they both stand upright.
Surrounded by all sorts of fragrances
without recognizing
them as fragrances, within an abundance
of colors that one
lifetime cannot contain.
Even if you ask
for flowers, even if
you are told
that you may leave hell, understanding
every word, hearing every-
thing, the flowers remain in
your hands.
Whether you receive
a flower from
a devil or an angel, take
one flower, and then an-
other, making
two flowers. A landscape
so silent it dries the bones, endlessly
vast even when touched.
Heaven
In heaven, the scene
of people planting flowers is
clearly visible.
Occasionally, the tops of flowers sway, ripples
on a lake.
But there is no one
in heaven. Did they go to see the flowers?
To see both the flowers and
the people?
Perhaps they saw someone pass by like a flower. Maybe
it was the back of a head they knew well.
In heaven, anything
worth stealing your heart is brightly visible.
Especially,
Hell is clearly visible, and so are the
people busily moving among the flowers that fill it. The flowers that
wilt as soon as they are planted, and those
that are planted again over them,
vividly seen.
Beautiful as if reaching heaven,
if there is a soul, it would
surely be stirred,
“Excuse me.
It’s me, can you hear me, please look at me.” Heaven is
sometimes noisy because of people speaking to the landscape.
No one plants flowers in heaven.
Over there,
together, they
end up going to plant flowers.
by Kim Bok Hui
Translated by Jack Saebyok Jung
Writer 필자 소개
Kim Bok Hui
Translator 번역가 소개
Jack Saebyok Jung
Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (Black Square Editions, 2025). A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he co-translated Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. His next book of translation, Kim Hyesoon’s Lady No, will be published by Ecco in 2026. He teaches at Davidson College.
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