Just Like

The title of Lee Sumyeong’s first collection in English, Just Like, translated from Korean by Colin Leemarshall, invites an immediate (mis)reading: that the translation is just like the original text. Of course, no translation is the same as the original, and Lee’s poems inhabit this impasse between original and translation. Leemarshall recalls how, on encountering Lee’s work for the first time, he felt a “compulsion to translate” poems whose unfixity encodes the prospect of being translated. 

From “Stall”:

Stall
a small stall
the stall exacerbates me.

Before I commit a stall the stall exacerbates me.
It is right that the stall be a stall possessing no space.

The word stall appears at first as a common noun, but soon takes on the gravitas of an abstract noun (“commit a stall”); the verbs are all weighty and yet there’s no obvious meaning to be gleaned from the poem. In an interview with Leemarshall (reproduced at the end of the book), Lee says, “For me, poetry is essentially an attempt to escape from the abyss of meaning and into surface.” While it can be difficult to not try and reach for meaning in these poems, Lee forecloses that possibility through syntactical instability; the words are only provisionally in place, they don’t concede to any fixed interpretations.

In his translator’s introduction—an extraordinary piece of criticism—Leemarshall traces an “uncertainty” in Lee’s poems, which, he writes, contain within them “other poems, variants of the given, secret iterations occulted in the undertows of disintegrative logic.” Even without access to the Korean originals, one can sense the uncertainty and unresolvedness of Lee’s work in these translations:

Carries me. Momentarily carries me here. Show me the here. Even if I enter here here does not come to me.

Lee’s poetics seems particularly responsive to the Benjaminian notion of the task of the translator—to liberate language through recreation. It takes an astute translator like Leemarshall to excavate these English poems from inside the Korean originals:

today my form is good. It is good that my form is with me.

Please show your form, you
abundant.