Yoo Heekyung: Three story-poems, translated from Korean by Stine An
About this episode
This episode features translations of Yoo Heekyung's story-poems and discusses their cultural and literary significance.
Read the translations of this poem on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-3/ Translator Stine An writes in the introduction: Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023), turns to the origins of stories and poetry. Both the tales that get passed on through time around a small fire on a winter night and the tales spun in the dark alone as a prelude to dreaming. When I first encountered Yoo’s story-poems, they felt like fine watercolour etchings from an old storybook—delicate, wistful, and glowing with a quiet warmth. Later, Yoo shared that his work was haunted by Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot (1842), the collection that introduced the modern prose poem to the Western literary tradition and inspired Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. These character-driven prose poems are like intimate one-act plays that flame into existence as visions. Within South Korean poetry, his debut Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Moonji Books, 2011) marked a departure from the experimental avant-garde poetics popular at the time. Yoo’s work as a writer and…
More episodes of Modern Poetry in Translation
- Renée Vivien & Tristan Corbière: Four poems, translated from French by Joshua Edward
- István Vörös: Two poems, translated from Hungarian by Adam Piette and Ágnes Lehóczky
- Ni Made Purnama Sari: three poems, translated from Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
- Anna T. Szabó: Three poems translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori
- I will not repeat Phryni…, by Iliassa Sequin, translated by Calliope Michail
- 'Minora Poetica X' by Dimitra Kotoula, tr. Dimitra Kotoula
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Modern Poetry in Translation podcast page.