I first encountered Lee Seong-beok’s poem on BTS fandom twitter (*cough* I’m an ARMY myself *cough*) because Kim Namjoon shared a collection of Lee’s poems on his Instagram. Then, it led me to the English translation of “To Whom I Could Give This Pain” published in his collection Ah, Mouthless Things, translated by Eun-Gwi Chung, Myung Mi Kim and Brother Anthony of Taizé. The poem strikes me.

   After climbing a hill and wondering to whom I could
   give this pain after stripping it off,
   I saw toppled trees drying
   on a hillside dug up by mechanical diggers.
   It was a shivering winter’s day,
   the short-lived sun veiled by sparse clouds.
   From a crevice in a severed rock
   birds with long beaks were tearing out earthworms.
   My pain was without a wound
   and in the bodies of the frayed, torn-out worms
   there was no pain.

It begins with a series of active verbs of “climbing,” “wondering,” “give,” and “stripping,” then followed by a winter landscape, then the narrator denying the woundless pain as the body is already “frayed” like “torn-out worms.” The poem conjoins pain from within with the spectacles of winterly nature. Such an image questions the sense of pain the “I” declare, rendering it as natural–nothing strikes the body. There’s no wound. But the pain remains.

Lee Seong-Beok is extremely skillful in playing around with those scenes. I, of course, cannot talk about his original syntax, rhythm, and rhyme in the Korean language. Nonetheless, and this is the grandeur of reading poems in translation, the English version creates a profound bridge to his imagery and wildering structure. In written words, objects, bodies, and feelings are often fleeting. And Lee grounds their materiality by bringing them together, arranging them in perplexing sequences so they remain solid and grounded. Because Lee knows very well that a strange image does not always create alienating moments; it actually suspends them. Lee holds those moments of rooting, animating thrills but at the same delaying figures of liveliness. The result is not only an often dark-something, but a piercing after-taste. Our tongue is left with the residue of his words. It cannot play around anymore.

I feel most of such residues in “Where a Flame Had Brushed Past.”

   It was a place where anyone can sit down
   and when you first entered here
   I saw a broken feeler. 
   Somewhere to stay anytime. 
   When you sat down there, you did not realize 
   that you would never be able to stand up again.  

He begins with an unknown place, referred only as “it.” There’s “anyone” who can sit including “you” although we never know for sure where’s the position of “I”–within the place? inside it? outside it? above it? It doesn’t matter, isn’t it? What matters is the place, that one place that holds “you” down without our knowledge. Undermining realization. And the figure of “a broken feeler”; perhaps no one can actually sense or search things anymore.

The narrator has focused on you since you enter the place. And then it takes another turn.

   You were a blister. That day, swelling 
   on my back where a flame had brushed past, 
   you were a blister that would never burst.

These last three lines catch me from floating. It brings my poem-gazing back to the body, the narrator’s body. The “you” was the damage of flame that “had brushed past”–history destroyed. But memories are bubbles of pain. And the back of a body, a place that cannot be seen fully without slightly tilting and head turning, is a place of friction. A damaged skin. “You” is the artefact of such a damnation. The poem is on page 19, still so many poems ahead, but at that moment, I closed the PDF I bought from Green Integer and let my mind going blank for a while. My tongue felt burned.

I cannot recommend you enough to pick up Lee Seong-Beok’s poems. I am compelled by the ways he creates those images and associations: “the bad taste of spring,” the sea that “felt slight fever and nausea like a pregnant woman” (or like experiencing sea sick), a girl’s intestines that were “removed nearly to the navel.” Some of his renditions of women figures push me to think about gender relations and painful poverty in a gore-ish manner. How do we overbear?

At last, his poems are not always comfortable but they are “always crazily beautiful.”