Book record
Love is the pain of feverish flowers
Ch'ŏn-hak Kwŏn
Translated from Korean by Kim Hana
Love Is the Pain of Feverish Flowers, by Ch’ŏn-hak Kwŏn and translated by Kim Hana, announces its lyric intensity immediately. The title is lush, overheated, and almost too much, which may be exactly the point. Love appears here not as calm mutual recognition, but as pain, fever, bloom, and bodily excess. In this Korean poetry collection, I would read the flowers not as pretty decoration, but as symptoms: color produced by pressure, tenderness made unstable by heat. Kim Hana’s translation has to carry an emotional register that could easily tip into abstraction if mishandled. The best way in may be to accept the drama of the title and let the poems show what kind of fever they mean. This seems like a book of ache, devotion, and floral intensity.
- Published
- 2017
- Publisher
- Seoul Selection
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- Korea, Republic of
- ISBN
- 9781624120602