The poem depicts the constant blooming of roses in various contexts, from mundane to disturbing. The speaker expresses frustration with the ubiquity of roses, telling them to "stop sending roses" and saying "there are so many roses, it's impossible to live." Strange images emerge, like roses blooming from stabbed thumbs or a "flock of swans" of blooming roses. The constant presence of roses seems oppressive and disturbing to the speaker.

1. To
Write
What
is
Inexpressible
Translating
Kim
Hyesoon’s
“Rose,
This
Year
Too”
and
“Personal
Prison”
Annah
Overly
Translations
Studies
Workshop

2. Annah Overly 2
Table
of
Contents
To
Write
What
is
Inexpressible:
Translating
Kim
Hyesoon’s
“Rose,
This
Year
Too”
and
“Personal
Prison”
.........................................................................................................................
3
Introduction
.....................................................................................................................................................
3
An
Overview
of
the
History
and
Study
of
Korean
Poetry
..................................................................
4
Kim
Hyesoon
....................................................................................................................................................
8
Rose,
This
Year
Too
...........................................................................................................................
10
Translating
“Rose,
This
Year
Too”:
Method
and
Considerations
..................................................
13
Personal
Prison
...................................................................................................................................
16
Translating
“Personal
Prison”:
Method
and
Considerations
.........................................................
17
Works
Cited
..........................................................................................................................................
19

3. Annah Overly 3
To
Write
What
is
Inexpressible:
Translating
Kim
Hyesoon’s
“Rose,
This
Year
Too”
and
“Personal
Prison”
Introduction
The impossibility of translating poetry has been a discussion among theorists for decades.
It seems like a task too big to surmount—to be able to translate the rhythms, rhymes, cadences,
and word play from one language to another while keeping in mind the images and symbols
throughout. Walter Benjamin wrote in The Task of the Translator, “While content forms a
certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its
content like a royal robe with ample folds” (19). I, too, believed that I would never be able to
translate poetry. There are many aspects of Korean poetry that I felt would be too difficult to
translate but upon encountering Don Mee Choi’s translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, I
decided to challenge myself with translating two recently published poems of Kim Hyesoon. In
my research, I found that the world of Korean poetry is extremely complex, pulling inspiration
from Chinese poetry forms, Korean oral traditions, and Western literary theory, creating a
literary scene still very much in flux. This paper will begin by looking at the world of Korean
poetry, its history and its influences. I will then review the works of Kim Hyesoon and her place
within modern Korean poetry. The last sections are the completed translations of “Rose, This
Year Too (Olhaeto changmika)” and “Personal Prison (Ilinyong kamok)” with accompanying
explanations on my methods of translating and other aspects that I took into consideration.

4. Annah Overly 4
An
Overview
of
the
History
and
Study
of
Korean
Poetry
Scholars of Korean poetry commonly agree that modern Korean poetry began with Ch’oe
Nam-sŏn’s1
“From the Sea to Children,” published in 1908 in the Sonyŏn (Children) literary
journal. Before Ch’oe Nam-sŏn came out with his “new poetry,” Korean poets wrote in a variety
of Chinese-derived styles, among these sijo and kasa being the most commonly used at the end
of the nineteenth century. As explained by Peter H. Lee in the collection, The Silence of Love:
Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry, songwriters relied on the use of syllable patterns and
“traditional forms of speech and allusion” in order to create new songs, but were unsuccessful in
trying to break away from the traditional prosodies (xi). Reportedly modeled after Byron’s The
Ocean, Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s “new poetry” was able to break through these stylistic modes, creating
a hybrid of traditional and modernist verse. The inflow of Western literary thought breathed new
life into Korean poetry, even in the midst of the Japanese occupation and the looming Korean
War. In Chung Chong-hwa’s book, The Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, he outlines three
main streams of Korean poetry that emerged during the colonial period and continued forward.
The first stream is the one “that brought poetry and politics together,” the second “contains the
poems which deal with sentiment and emotion of a traditional kind,” and the third being “poems
of a modernist nature” (Chung 5, 6). In spite of the varying approaches to poetry, Chung believes
that modern poetry still follows the same basic themes of their ancestors: “love of Nature,
nihilism, humanism, or even sentimentalism” (3).
Chung outlines the changing trends between the decades since the end of the Korean
War, discussing first how the poets of the 1950s “tended to show a modernist inclination,”
1
Korean names and words in this text will be written in the McCune-Reischauer Romanization
system unless the person concerned has made known their preferred spelling or it is their
published name.

5. Annah Overly 5
perhaps due to the stationing of foreign militaries on the Korean peninsula and the war in
general, “helping to shake the foundation of the traditional poetic spirit (8). The 60s saw a
reversal in style, with poets having returned to “traditional poetry” while the modernists “turned
their attention inwardly, leaving their concern with the surface of poetry behind” (Chung 9). This
seems to be influenced by the increased internal conflicts, political and economic, in contrast to
the previous decades’ foreign enemies, the Japanese and the communists. It is interesting the
Chung appears to feel that the modernist movement in Korean poetry, created through the
influence of western literary thought, has created “superficial artefacts” as they have borrowed
an “alien tool” (7). He notes that among the three streams discussed, “the first two groups reflect
the strong elements of Korea’s traditional poetic sensibility” while “this third kind aligns with
non-indigenous notions of the form,” (Chung 6, 7). Chung does not give any resolute
conclusions on the future of Korean poetry; writing in 1986, he is quick to note that the modern
Korean poetry we are discussing is only “70 odd years” old. Thus, he gives up space for the
reader to consider that the fate of modern Korean poetry has still not yet been decided and
continues to be in stylistic flux.
Despite the numerous anthologies available to one who wishes to study modern Korean
poetry, there are some notable absences from the study. Within The Silence of Love, zero of the
sixteen featured poets are female. In Joyce Jaihiun Kim’s anthology The Immortal Voice, only
five of the sixty-three poets whose work appeared are female. Chung’s anthology did not fare
that much better, with four female poets and thirteen male. From a historical standpoint, the
small consideration towards female poets in Korean literature is not surprising. In comparison to
male writers on a whole, publication of translated works by Korean women is very small, even
more so when only looking at poetry. Historically, anthologies of works by scholars focused

6. Annah Overly 6
more on those of intellectual merit, which was bestowed on men due to their ability to be
educated. The work of female poets that appear in such historical anthologies were usually those
of kisaeng or “dancing girls,” Korean courtesans who were legal performers. Due to Confucian
social system, kisaeng occupied the lowest yet subversive social class. As Constantine
Contogenis and Wolhee Choe explore in their book Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of
the Last Korean Dynasty, a “kisaeng’s creative performance in music and dance was of the
moment only, not considered worthy to be part of the officially recorded culture of her time,”
and those that did get written down were those that had been passed down orally or in a scholar’s
collection (11). Contongenis and Choe hypothesize that “a kisaeng’s paradoxical identity as a
socially despised yet popularly (unofficially) acclaimed artist in music, dance, and, at times,
poetry may well have given her the kind of sustained self-consciousness necessary to the search
for a unique identity,” which is greatly contrasted to women of higher classes than them whose
abilities were confined to their daily labor (12). Thus, it is possible to see the rarity of female
poetry already within the Korean literary sphere even before the advent of modern Korean
poetry.
An emergence of feminist female poets in Korea came in the 1970s through the
development of a self-determination and decolonization movement of nationalist literature, as
described in Don Mee Choi’s collection of translations Anxiety of Words. Termed “national
literature” (minjok munhak) and “people’s literature” (minjung munhak), the literature addressed
“Korea’s national division and social contradiction” as well as “those most oppressed by Korea’s
authoritarian government and the process of industrialization” (Anxiety of Words xvii). Within
this male-dominated minjung movement, feminism arose to combat women’s oppression,

7. Annah Overly 7
“connect[ing] issues of class, gender, and nation” (Anxiety of Words xvii). And from within this
movement, Kim Hyesoon arose.

8. Annah Overly 8
Kim
Hyesoon
Kim Hyesoon was born in 1955 and had her literary debut in the journal, Literature and
Intellect, in 1979 with four poems, including “Poet Smoking a Cigarette (Dambaereul piuneun
siin)” (LTI Korea Author Database). Since then, she has been the recipient of five literary
awards, including the prestigious Sowol Poetry Award in 2000. She is a member of Another
Culture (Ttohana ŭi munhwa), an organization dedicated to feminist theory and research in South
Korea. She has published 10 collections of poems and 1 book of essays. From those collections,
Don Mee Choi has selected poems and published her translations into six books and one
collection of short essays. In her introductions to Kim’s poetry in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of
Feathers, Don Mee Choi writes, “Kim Hyesoon is one of the few women poets…to arrive on the
[literary] scene with a stunning language of resistance to the prescribed literary conventions for
women,” language couched in passivity and contemplation (8). In contrast to these literary
conventions, Kim’s poetry often points to the struggles women face in all of their many
identities, whether as a mother, daughter, or wife. Her poems are cited as having a grotesque
nature, as identified in Ruth Williams’ “’Female Poet’ as Revolutionary Grotesque: Feminist
Transgression in the poetry of Ch’oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju.” Williams writes
that, “the poems’ ‘ugly’ images weep an excess, which transgresses not only Korean gender
norms but also the strictures of the yŏryu siin (female poet) literary tradition…challeng[ing]
Korean gender norms” (396). In an interview with Charles Montgomery of the website Korean
Literature in Translation, Kim said that, “In my poetry, a woman’s identity exists not as a single
entity. I, made of various women, talk about the many ‘I’s I met at the crossroads of my life.
Those ‘I’s are the women who are ‘doing my poetry’.” Kim thus writes from a space of
pluralism. She references this same tactic of hers also when asked about the contrasting

9. Annah Overly 9
“grotesque” or chaotic imagery pointed out by Williams and what Montgomery sees as
“emotionally focused and self controlled.” In her reply, Kim says, “It seems critics call it
‘grotesque’ or ‘surreal’ when faced with writings or attitudes they can’t readily
understand…Poetry is not a genre in which one writes what is expressible…In poetry, what truly
exists or does not is not of importance. I would like my poems to have multiple points of
pursuit.” By forming these “polyhedrons” that can also become simplified when looked at a
distance, Kim challenges herself with the “impossibility” to express the inexpressible of daily
life. In the poems I have chosen to translate for this project, similar chaotic yet simple,
impossibly possible images emerge.

10. Annah Overly 10
Rose,
This
Year
Too
Kim Hyesoon
Above the bed Rose bloomed
In the window Rose bloomed
In the car Rose bloomed
In the professor’s office Rose bloomed, even though Rose is neglected, I hate Rose
In the North and South Rose bloomed, the shutters descend and in the East and West Rose
bloomed
The window opened and Rose bloomed
You shed the gloves and 1 rose sticks out
A troubled face, shedding layers of clouds, raises up 6 roses
Stabbed thumbs, 7 roses coming out, peeling off their scars like stickers
There are so many roses, it’s impossible to live
Stop sending roses!
Anger arising, Rose bloomed
Rose is followed
Rose is beaten up
I am not Rose I do not know this person
Rose shouts in the street
Now because of Rose I can’t even eat
Unable to meet people and dreaming while standing
Somebody told me, “Because of your dreams, Rose blooms”
Rose is the king of mental calculation

11. Annah Overly 11
89 x 35= 3,115
89 x 26= 2,314
Above RosePlate is RoseGun
Below RoseGlasses is RoseBasement
The plane falls and Rose comes
The train derails and Rose comes
The ship sinks and Rose comes
Pop! Pop! Like a flock of swans, heart racing, blooming Rose
Even worse, 35 1/7 roses came today
In the bathtub of RoseHotel I must trample Rose
From now on call me Rose! Rose has come
Grab Rose! I talk in my sleep, beautifully at length
That scream swallowing dark underground, Rose rises from that drying humidity
My body shivering shakes
Only the cockscomb of burrowed chickens raise up from the ground
Ave Maria! Rose blooms Amen! Rose blooms
Descending, descending but with every step no closer to reaching the bottom, Rose!
Desperate, it seems there is more to be said
I stamp down on those lips
Like a dead person’s secret Rose bloomed
Rose wants to speak
Compare Rose’s ears
In Rose’s silence there is an answer to the puzzle

12. Annah Overly 12
Like vertigo Rose bloomed
Like the silence of a scream Rose bloomed
Like the dead turning over in its grave Rose bloomed
Like fishing out from the water a hot confession burned by fire
Rose bloomed
Like the heart of a blood-red fog
Like a white rabbit’s heart wrapped in a red carpet
Like a concealed red heart in a pure white urn
Like that moment when just one more breath was wished for

13. Annah Overly 13
Translating
“Rose,
This
Year
Too”:
Method
and
Considerations
“Rose, This Year Too” at first seemed to be a deceptively simple poem to translate.
Without a rhyme scheme and no verses to be confined to, Kim has created a poem that plays
with the expectations of the Korean reader. The poem begins with the speaker describing a
bloomed rose, which inhabits multiple spaces. When first translating these lines, I thought to
translate the lines as, “Above the bed, the rose bloomed,” instead of “Above the bed Rose
bloomed.” This was in consideration of the subject particle 가 (ka) that occurs after ‘rose’ in the
Korean version of the text. While Korean has definite articles, 그 (the, that), 이 (this), and others,
they are rarely used unless something is being contrasted with another. When translating from
Korean into English then, one must add definite articles to make the sentence grammatically
correct. With this in mind, I thought ‘the rose’ was suitable. However, while reading a translation
by Don Mee Choi of Kim’s “되지라서 괜찮아 (Doechirasŏ kwaench’ana),” I noticed that Choi
had capitalized ‘Pig (Doechi)’ when it occurred as the subject and sometimes when marked as
the object with the object particle 을/를 (ŭl/rŭl) (Kim 97). I decided to try out capitalizing ‘rose’
in the same way and found that the marking of the subject in this way added an amount of
ambiguity about the rose’s identity that can be felt in the Korean original.
Throughout the poem as well are issues of implied subject, where an action is described
or the object receives an action but there is no subject noted who preforms such. This is not a
grammatical aspect inherent to only Korean but also appears in Japanese. In Malinda Markham’s
“To Translate the Shaking: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Poetry (and Coaxing it into
English),” she offers insights into her own thoughts on translating parts of poems that do not
have a named subject within the line. She states, “Linguistically, in Japanese, the subject…is

14. Annah Overly 14
often understood and left unsaid,” creating a sense of linguistic indefiniteness that depends upon
the reader understanding the context (Markham 17). When she asks the poet, Aoyama Miyuki,
about who it was who saw a snake in a poem she translated, Aoyama reportedly wrote back,
“How interesting! I never thought about it. Who saw the snake? Well, both people, I guess”
(Markham 18). Markham makes the decision to simply translate it as “yesterday’s snake,” saying
“I don’t know who saw the snake, but it was seen” (18). Similarly in “Rose, This Year Too,”
Kim describes two actions happening to Rose by an unnamed subject; first someone follows
Rose and then someone beats up Rose. The reader knows this action is happening to Rose
because of the presence of the object particle but the lack of a subject creates an ambiguity.
Keeping Markham’s situation in mind, I decided to translate the two lines to be “Rose is
followed/ Rose is beaten up” to reflect the ambiguity. It appears that the subject could well be the
‘I’ 나는 (nanŭn) that surfaces every once in a while but I decided to keep the use of the pronoun
to only those lines where 나는 (nanŭn) is written.
The last aspect of “Rose, This Year Too,” that I would like to discuss is Kim’s use of the
adverb ‘like, as if’ 처럼 (ch’ŏrŏm) in the poem. In Markham’s article, she discusses how the
Japanese use the word “seems” frequently in poetry, limiting the reader’s perception and creating
a vagueness within the text that a would lead a non-native speaker, that is, leads Markham to
want to ask “How much like that?” or “How closely does it seem that way?” (17). I would
hesitate to say though that that is what Kim is trying to get at in this poem. Instead, Kim’s poetry
often tries to create images within the reader’s mind, leading closer and closer to that which she
most wants the reader to comprehend. The use of ch’ŏrŏm thus urges the reader forward or
supplements the readers understanding of the full picture instead of letting the reader gloss over
it. While reading ch’ŏrŏm over and over again at first feels repetitive to the English reader,

15. Annah Overly 15
without its inclusion, the reader would lose the sense that this information is supportive of Kim’s
meaning, instead viewing each image as distinctly different thoughts. For this reason, I have kept
it within the text, choosing to translate it each time as ‘like.’

16. Annah Overly 16
Personal
Prison
Kim Hyesoon
You are like a person who has entered the water, standing alone
Open-mouthed, the water gently rises up to your throat
Standing there without even taking your clothes off
Red paint rises from the blossomed flower on your clothes like smoke
One person, wearing a life jacket and emerging from the sea, filmed by a helicopter
Like a one-syllable word disappearing in a thick dictionary
When the eyes close at last, at its dark foundation, a single radiant larva
In the tunnel of a mine, its portal blocked, heard through a stethoscope, the breath of one last
remaining person
Who scooped up just one body and stuck it in the middle of this intersection
After filling the sea with jello and letting it solidify?
You live in a personal prison, molded for your body
Avoiding me, from my body fleeing like a pillar of salt

17. Annah Overly 17
Translating
“Personal
Prison”:
Method
and
Considerations
The translation of “Personal Prison” was slightly different from that of “Rose, This Year
Too” not only due to its form but also in content. Unlike “Rose, This Year Too,” the translation
of the title took some time to decide on as 일인용 (Ilinyong) has a few different meanings and
can be translated as ‘personal,’ ‘individual,’ or ‘one-man.’ I first ruled out ‘one-man’ due to its
gender connotations, especially since there are no obvious references to whether the subject of
the poem is male or female. I ultimately decided on ‘personal’ as the poem’s content alludes to a
situation in which a person has created the circumstances around their own prison. On the other
hand, ‘individual’ would have appeared to only encompass the meaning of one person inhabiting
the prison and not the added aspect of personal responsibility. Kim addressed this same issue of
her use of terms with multiple meanings in her interview with Montgomery, stating that when
her poems are translated, “A play on words and ambiguity in Korean language, of course, gets
lost…I often intentionally use words with 2 or 3 different meanings in an ambiguous manner…
However, after translation, these no longer exist.” It is hard to remedy this loss of the
multilayered meanings within Ilinyong but I hope that in the use of the word ‘personal’ over
‘one-man’ or ‘individual,’ some of the feelings of the original still remain.
With six stanzas each comprising of two lines, “Personal Prison” offers some freedom in
choosing the order of the lines in the translation. By this I mean that due to the grammatical
structure of Korean and the way in which Kim has chosen to order the lines, the order of the
translated lines with a stanza may be switched so as to best convey the original. I only decided to
do so with one stanza, stanza 5, which contains a sentence. The literal translation of the stanza is:
“Who, after filling the sea with jello and letting it solidify,

18. Annah Overly 18
Scooped up just one body and stuck it in the middle of this intersection?”
I chose instead to switch the two lines, making the question flow more naturally in English. I
considered doing the same with stanzas 3 and 6, which both feature a second line ending in
adverb, describing the first line. However, I decided that the stanzas still made sense
grammatically if the lines stayed in their formation.
Lastly, Kim’s use of simile throughout the poem provides an interesting challenge in
terms of getting the image of the simile correct. The first simile I have translated to “Like a one-
syllable word disappearing in a thick dictionary.” In the Korean original, Kim uses the image of
how easy it is to lose track of a single-syllable word in a dictionary, as it is surrounded by more
complex or longer words, to emphasize the singularity of that one person coming out from the
sea and being filmed by someone in a helicopter. Similarly, I have chosen to translate the last
line of the poem as “Avoiding me, from my body fleeing like a pillar of salt.” The image that
Kim draws upon here appears to be a biblical one, from the tale of Lot’s wife, who disobeys the
messengers of God and looks back at the destruction of the city, thereupon turning into a pillar of
salt. This use of the symbol of the pillar of salt by Kim seems to suggest that some sort of
voyeuristic sin is at work, however this meaning only arrives when the reader is made aware of
the biblical meaning. In both of my translations of these two lines, I am slightly disappointed as I
feel the true intention behind them has not yet been as fully realized as possible.

19. Annah Overly 19
Works
Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence
Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000. 15-23. Print
Choi, Don Mee, trans. and ed. Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women.
Brookline, MAL Zephyr Press, 2006. Print.
---. Introduction. Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers. By Kim Hyesoon. Notre Dame, IN:
Action Books, 2008. 8-11. Print.
Chung, Chong-hwa, ed. The Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry. London: East-West
Publications, Ltd., 1986. Print.
Contogenis, Constantine and Wolhee Choe. Songs of the Kisaeng: Courtesan Poetry of the Last
Korean Dynasty. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1997. Print
“Interview with Poet Kim Hyesoon.” Korean Literature in Translation. Wordpress, 8 Jan. 2013.
Web. 7 May. 2015
Kim, Joyce Jaihiun, ed. The Immortal Voice: An Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry. Seoul:
Inmun Publishing Co., 1974. Print.
Kim, Hyesoon 김혜순. “Olhaeto changmika” 올해도 장미가 [Rose, This Year Too].
Hankukmunhak 한국문학 296 (2014): 156-158. Print.
---. “Ilinyong kamok” 일인용 감옥 [Personal Prison]. Hankukmunhak 한국문학 296 (2014): 159.
Print.
---. I’m OK, I’m Pig! Trans. Don Mee Choi. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2014. Print.
“Korean Writer Database: Kim Hyesoon.” Literature Translation Institute of Korea. N.p., n.d.
Web. 7 May. 2015.

20. Annah Overly 20
Lee, Peter H., ed. The Silence of Love: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry. Honolulu, HI: Hawai’i
UP, 1980. Print.
Markham, Malinda. “To Translate the Shaking: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Poetry (and
Coaxing it into English).” Antioch Review 62.1 (2004): 6-18. Print.