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Winner of the Big Other Award in Translation
Winner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work
Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.
Don Mee Choi’s translations deftly activate a visionary poetry of great speed, volume, and vision.
—judges of the The 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation PrizeYi Sang (1920-1937) was a painter, architect, poet and writer of 1930s Korea, when Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. Yi Sang wrote and published in both Korean and Japanese until his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 27, after imprisonment by Japanese police for thought crimes in Tokyo. His work shows innovative engagement with European modernism, especially that of Surrealism and Dada. He is considered one of the most experimental writers of Korean modernism.
Yi Sang: A Timeline (by Jack Jung)
Poem No. 1
Poems No. 4 & 5
Poems
translated from the Korean by Jack Jung
I
Bird’s Eye View
Poem 1
Poem 2
Poem 3
Poem 4
Poem 5
Poem 6
Poem 7
Poem 8
Poem 9
Poem 10
Poem 11
Poem 12
Poem 13
Poem 14
Flowering Tree
This Kind of Poetry
1933, 6, 1
Mirror
Common Anniversary
Poem 15
II
* Titled * For * So * Yŏng *
Decorum
Paper Tombstone
Paper Tombstone—The Missing Wife—
Fortunetelling
Brazier
Mornings
Family
Fortunetelling
Path
III
Street Outside Street
Clear Mirror
Critical Conditions
○Ban
○Pursuit
○Drowning
○Cliff
○White Painting
○Lineage
○Location
○Prostitution
○Lifetime
○Innards
○Blood Relation
○Self-Portrait
I WED A TOY BRIDE
IV
Paradise Lost
Girl
Paragraphs on Blood Relations
Paradise Lost
Face Mirror
Moon Wound
Yi Sang’s cover design ofChosun and Architecture magazine
Reproductions of poems in Japanese: “Architecture Infinite Hexagon: Diagnosis 0:1” and “Architecture Infinite Hexagon: 22 years”
Poems
translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
Introduction to the Japanese Poems of Yi Sang (by Sawako Nakayasu)
from Abnormal Reversible Reaction
○Abnormal Reversible Reaction
○Fragment Scenery
○ ▽’s Games
○ Beard
○Hunger
from Bird’s Eye View
○Two People—1—
○Two People—2—
○LE URINE
○Movement
from Solid Angle Blueprint
○Memorandum on the Line 1
○Memorandum on the Line 2
○Memorandum on the Line 3
○Memorandum on the Line 4
○Memorandum on the Line 5
○Memorandum on the Line 6
○Memorandum on the Line 7
from Architecture Infinite Six-Sided Figure
○AU MAGASIN DE NOUVEAUTES
○Diagnosis 0:1
Yi Sang with writer Pak T’ae-wŏn and poet Kim So-un
Essays
translated from the Korean by Jack Jung
A Journey into the Mountain Village
Ennui
After Sickbed
Sad Story
A Letter to My Sister
Tokyo
notes
Stories
translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney
Yi Sang’s House (by Don Mee Choi)
Page from “Spider&SpiderMeetPigs” with original spacing in Korean and English
Spider&SpiderMeetPigs
notes
True Story—Lost Flower
notes
Afterword: Thirteen for Yi Sang, for Arachne (by Joyelle McSweeney)
Yi Sang Collage (by Don Mee Choi)
Acknowledgments