Scale & stairs by Hŭi-dŏk Na and translated by Won-Chun Kim

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Scale & stairs by Hŭi-dŏk Na translated by Won-Chun Kim is published by White Pine Press. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781893996243E12.

Scale & Stairs, by Na Hŭi-dŏk and translated by Won-Chun Kim, is a Korean poetry collection whose title feels almost architectural in its modesty. A scale weighs; stairs ascend or descend. Both are instruments of measure, but both also involve the body. You step, you balance, you compare, you move. Na’s poetry often attends to delicate emotional and ecological registers, and this book seems likely to make small structures carry large feeling. I would read it as a meditation on relation: between height and weight, effort and judgment, movement and pause. The ampersand is useful, too, because it refuses to resolve the two images into one. Translation here becomes a set of steps itself, carrying Korean lyric measure into another language without pretending the distance has disappeared.

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.