Book record
Scale & stairs
Hŭi-dŏk Na
Translated from Korean by Won-Chun Kim
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.
- Published
- 2009
- Publisher
- White Pine Press
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- Korea, Republic of
- ISBN
- 9781893996243