Sneak Peek at Seeking You
First look at select poems from Seeking You, a poetry collection by Jeong Ho-Seung, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé
Jeong Ho-Seung is one of Korea's most popular and prolific poets; his poetry collections have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Georgian, and Mongolian. Jeong’s accolades include the So-Wol Literary Prize, the Jeong Ji-young Literary Prize, the Pyeonun Literary Prize, the Catholic Literary Award, the Sanghwa Poetry Award, and the Gongcho Literary Prize. Seeking You by Jeong Ho-Seung, published in Korean in 2020, will be released in English translation by Trio House Press in 2025.
Brother Anthony began to translate modern Korean literature in 1988, and since then has published a wide variety of works from such classic Korean authors. In 1991 he won a Modern Korean Literature Translation Award from The Korea Times. In 1994, Brother Anthony became a naturalized Korean citizen, taking on the Korean name An Sonjae, Sonjae being the Korean form of Sudhana, the 'little pilgrim' of the Buddhist scripture The Gandavyuha Sutra. Seeking You by Jeong Ho-Seung is translated into English by Brother Anthony.
Longed-for Lamplight
When will I ever see again,
seeping through the crack of her bedroom door,
the lamplight of Mother sewing.
When will Mother be able to don her reading glasses
and stitch up again my many wounds?
When will I be able to visit heaven again,
following the lamplight seeping through the crack of the door
of the room opposite, where Father prays
with hands joined on the Bible.
The longed-for apricot-hued light of the village
when I walked along with my mother,
the light that used to light up my room as a boy,
dispelling all fear of the world’s darkness
as I fixed my eyes on it and the distant dawn.Leading my Shadow
The sun is setting
and there is a place I must go, leading my shadow.
I don't know where that place is
but Mother knows.
Mother promised to tell me
where that place is
and who I have to meet there,
but then she left in a hurry without a word.
Do I, who have betrayed my shadow all my life long,
now have to go somewhere without Mother,
leading my shadow?
As I sat on the stone steps of Seoul Station
with the shadows of the homeless,
the day I followed the sound of the trains leaving,
even my shadow left me and set off for somewhere.
The sun is setting
and will I be able to meet someone somewhere
if I become a person with no shadow?
Even if the sun were to rise tonight
I can't go to visit you.House of Tears
I felt sad to think that night was coming and morning not coming,
so today tears bloom as flowers.
I gathered all the tears in the world that I had shed
and sowed them like flower seeds in the flower bed Mother cultivated
but not a single flower bloomed throughout my life,
only the poisonous mushrooms of hate and anger grew,
so every day I ate poisonous mushrooms and collapsed by the wellside.
Tears turned into flowers today as soon as Mother died
and became a small house of tears with a flowerbed.
Carrying the house of tears on my back like a snail,
I hurriedly set off to the place where Mother went.
Heading for the flowerbed of the House of Tears,
leaning against the wall with rose moss flowers blooming,
I become the old man of a hungry boy eating cup noodles
and set off to see Mother.A Note from Brother Anthony
The title of this collection, “Seeking You,” suggests a yearning for an encounter, a relationship that will alone make life worth living. It equally reminds us that our lives are deeply marked by absence and loss. At the same time, there seems to be no guarantee that the search will be successful, and many of the poems in the collection resound with anguished solitude. Indeed, as the title of another collection by Jeong Ho-seung insists, it is necessary to experience solitude if we are to be truly human. Behind several poems in “Seeking You” is the memory of the day when the poet’s mother lay dying in the hospital. Reckoning that she was not going to die for several hours, he made a quick journey home for some urgent business. On returning to the hospital, he found that she had died a few moments before. The anguish at not having been present as his mother drew her last breath resounds behind a number of poems. But beyond that particular moment, in a very different vein, we find multiple references to “bird shit,” which might surprise western readers, unfamiliar with the affectionate emotions underlying the words in Korean. Bird shit (‘droppings’ is a genteel circumlocution often used in English) is pure, utterly natural, a humble aspect of nature capable of restoring our wretched humanity to its proper dignity and context.
The seeker in these poems is seeking a ‘you’ who is at times an unspecified ‘You’ of transcendent dimensions, deserving a capital letter without becoming a specific divine Being. There is no end to the poet’s seeking, even if he does not know T. S. Elliot’s “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (Four Quartets). Jeong Ho-seung expresses deep anguish before the ambiguous human condition and his response is what he terms a ‘seeking,’ yet always, somewhere in these poems, there is a gleam of meaning and hope, a finding in response to our seeking, a finding that we scarcely dare hope for, even if it is in Hell:
To Time
Don't ask me what I loved.
Don't ask me who I loved.
The more I love, what more could I have to say?
I merely lived dligently until rice turned into tears.
I've already lost my way and am crying out here alone.
Even if night grows darker, the sun doesn't set,
even if morning comes, the stars don't set.
There were times when I waited alone and wept,
but don't ask me what and how I loved.
Truth also means weeping alone in silence.
Whatever I loved then lost my life,
maybe there was true love even in lies?
Please, don't ask
whether love gave birth to hate and hate gave birth to love,
whether dislike and hatred were needed and had value
in order to realize true love.
The more I love, the more I lose love,
so what way of life can I become?