Love is the pain of feverish flowers by Ch’ŏn-hak Kwŏn and translated by Kim Hana

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Love is the pain of feverish flowers by Ch’ŏn-hak Kwŏn translated by Kim Hana is published by Seoul Selection. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781624120602E12.

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.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.