Just Like
Lee Sumyeong, translated by Colin Leemarshall
Moon Country Korean Poetry Series, Black Ocean, 2024

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he surreal meets language poetry, before undergoing complementary ‘shock of translation’ treatment in Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like, the ninth book in Black Ocean’s Moon Country Korean Poetry Series.

The title Just Like is meta: the poems are ‘just like’ the poems they equally could have been. In his extensive ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Colin Leemarshall presents these poems through the lens of this possibility, and his translation is key to the poetics of the book. He takes Walter Benjamin’s idea that a translator’s job is to ‘bring to light’ the ‘pure language’ of a text through their translation to the next level, through his bespoke concept of allopoetics:

[ . . .] within and outside of the poems there are [ . . .] other poems, variants of the given, secret iterations occulted in the undertows of disintegrative logic, isomorphic grammar, surreptitious homophony, and various other phenomena.

Each poem is just one of many, Leemarshall is saying, the one ghost captured on film out of multiple phantoms auditioning for the role. He leans into Lee Sumyeong’s unorthodox writing with ease, as only someone in their element can (not surprising given his background as an experimental poet running innovative small press Erotoplasty). Lee purposely pivots from meaning and message in her poetry, consigning her poetry to the ‘difficult’ label and unappealing to South Korean mainstream poetry audiences. This defiant lack of ‘poetic ballast’ is precisely what attracted Leemarshall. With her non-literary language pool and her disinterest in lyric overfamiliarity Lee hopes to expand the ‘scope of poetry’ she tells her translator in the interview at the back of the book, originally published in Australian magazine Rabbit. Evolving Steinian tableau in the poetry and Benjaminian theory in the translation, Just Like is progressive on behalf of poet and translator, and, under the editorship of Korean-based poet and translator, Jake Levine, the Moon Country Series is also. All-in-all, a dream team to say the least! The books are aesthetically drool-worthy too, designer Abby Haddican’s cover images are very much works of art in themselves.

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he reader is plunged into Lee’s ‘non-literary language pool’ from the outset. The ‘uncanny grammar’ and ‘permutational richness’ of the first poem, ‘things like cement vegetable paper,’ seduced Leemarshall, triggering a need rather than a want to translate, he explains in his introduction. For those more familiar with the Western canon think Gertrude Stein meets Russell Edson:

A man runs a field and the field of the man running the field caves in. A man lacking a caved-in field to the man runs. Things like cement vegetable paper sweltering he haphazardly plucks a cabbage.

The detail of who the man is is irrelevant and beside the point, as is often the way with Edson. Like Stein, Lee is interested in the ‘abandonment’ or ‘erasure’ of the self. Upending a reader’s pre-existing ideas around meaning encourages new ways of perceiving. These ways are rendered by the odd sentences, which unsettle and make no ordinary sense. With no emotion-soaked lyrical line in sight, expectations of poetry are purposefully defied. Those looking for neatness and answers came to the wrong place and have wandered off the safety of the main road. Good news is it’s a lot more interesting!

Don Mee Choi, the Korean American poet and translator, is cited in the introduction talking about being wrong on purpose:

I think I was wrong, to begin with, because I was Korean, but when I first came to the States, people constantly tried to correct my English spelling and pronunciation. My British English was wrong because it was uttered from a mouth attached to an unexpected face, a wrong face [ . . .] translation is in a perpetual state of being wrong because it isn’t the original.

Could the perpetual state of being wrong in translation be applied in reverse to Lee’s poems? They do so many things that poems aren’t meant to do, which is what makes the work so joyous. Her poems are steps to right the wrong(s) of decolonisation.

The poem ‘today ah that reminds me’ contains an everyday phrase in its title. ‘Today’ is arguably the out-of-place word: the idea of ‘today’ as the reminder, rather than something more tangible and specific within that day. Although invoking the everyday, this is far from an everyday poem, even as poetry is taken down a peg or two, to be level with the trivial. This creates a kind of comic irony, it opens:

Today ah that reminds me, I have a promise to keep. Put on my gloves and feel my forehead.

The second sentence implies that putting on gloves and feeling one’s forehead is a logical response to being reminded about a promise. Or even that doing this action is the promise.

The next sentence: the promise ‘is ashamed’ in its personification adds another layer of wrongness, like the uncomfortable field.

Like this I want to stay with the plants that pump out plants. Want to scrub the plants until dying the hands blue. Any stuck-out tongue is blue when the promise is activated.

The verb ‘activated’, used in this next extract, is usually used in connection with something like a bomb, machinery, technology, something being put into action. It is this kind of strange choice of words in this assemblage, progressing the Steinian minimal phrase to an expanded tableau, that makes the writing new.

By using administrative language from the non-literary pool, rather than the ‘poetic’, a more unfamiliar feeling is created, one which we are not used to in poetry. So Lee is ‘activating’ her aim of widening the scope of poetry. Well-read readers of poetry don’t want or need the familiar spelled out to them for the umpteenth time, they want and need to feel something different and to be stimulated cerebrally.

In addition to the mixing of the various language pools that we swim through every day, there is a sense that the poetry is of, about, and for an out-of-placeness in ‘normal’ society, that stresses that we do not/that they do not fit.

To touch on the surreality of Lee’s poetry, in the extract above, which is a particularly striking image. It is interesting to note that this vibrant imagery is disrupted by language. The picture being painted is colourful, bold and energetic, yes, but what is happening is not quite clear, it is ‘just like’ the thread that links it together has been removed. This could be comparable to cubism in its abstract, fragmented representation of reality.

Perhaps this disruption of image is something that distinguishes Lee from other Korean female surrealists, in the Moon Country series and beyond. The poet Yi Won (b. 1968), for instance, who I will call a second-generation surrealist, started writing her poetry a generation after the original Korean feminist poets such as Kim Hyesoon (b. 1955) who wrote at a more politically turbulent and oppressive time. Yi Won is also image-led and like Lee avoids writing specifically ‘about’ things, unlike, for the most part, the more politically charged titan of Korean surrealism Kim Hyesoon, but whose work still makes perfect sense linguistically and within the surreal logic. Moon Bo Young (b. 1992), another Moon Country Poet, I will call third generation, writes gloriously surreal work, clear surreal images, but makes perfect sense linguistically. The image is too dispersed and fragmented to grasp with Lee because of the ruptured language and disruption of syntax.

Lee teasingly explores emotion in ‘someone briefly’ from a distance. Eschewing self-indulgent emotion, traces of ‘raw emotion’ are instead present. This is a different recipe for sadness and yearning than we are used to:

Woke slowly. Woke crying. Tears fell without reason from within sleep.

The text is written simply, like secretarial notes. The shoulders are scattered. How can shoulders be scattered? It is a deviant collocation, like the uncomfortable field, like the ashamed promise. Lee is turning away from meaning and towards sensation. Rewiring the reader’s brain with this administrative matter-of-fact breakdown of emotions and the nonsensical images as confusing as emotions themselves.

Throwing the beach ball the girls are reiterated.

The word choice ‘reiterated’ is like ‘activated’, administrative and, like scattered shoulders, out-of-joint. It moves the reader away from sense and in the process further away from cliché, showing us new ways to emphasise and say what we want via peculiarity.

Lee aims to move away from meaning, but there is meaning if we wish to tap into it. We each bring our own meaning—Barthes’ death of the author coming into play. Or new meanings are created. For example, reiterate can be used to emphasise. In that sense, they are made more like girls by throwing the ball, displaying their girlness. Girls as a costume:

Well-known costumes were invariably established I keep wanting to be your costume.

We all wear costumes. We want to see what it is like to be someone else, and to wear that costume. So not nonsensical as seems and can scan if we wish it to. Continuing to unpack:

I want to be your empty beach ball.

Beach balls are full of air. So an empty beachball would be deflated. Useless, unusable. Nothing more than a costume. Hence to briefly be someone. But also, equally, to a certain extent, it was empty in the first place, a hollow space inside.

‘I fit wherever’, the final sentence, seems pertinent to the whole collection, seems to say there is nothing inside, I am malleable. And if already empty even when full, nothing visible at least—it is then a slippage between states, two states in one, and about perception and what you bring to reality. The real and unreal make our perception and make up our everyday experience. What we understand as reality is both true and untrue at once. In line with allopoetics, we have allomeanings, then. Ultimately, empty or full beach ball it’s still the same, doesn’t matter or make any difference.

‘I want to be your nothing’ nonchalantly supports this and discards the idea of both feeling and meaning in life. Taking the ball of nothing as a plaything rather than being worried or afraid of the nothingness.

In further support of this idea Sumyeong is very happy for there to be multiple readings of her work and in fact, hopes the poems avoid ‘a single interpretive lens.’ On her objects she says:

I don’t think it’s at all strange to read the objects in my poems under anti-capitalist, quantum mechanical, or ecopoetic lenses since my poetry, doesn’t overtly provide any lenses. Readers of my poetry can interpret, it how they wish. If I have a hope, it’s that the objects contained in my poetry are sufficiently diverse as to preclude a single interpretive lens.’

‘most of him’ displays the extreme of Lee’s disinterested relation to emotion. For Lee, lyric poetry’s appeals to the emotion are ‘frequently a spurious means of trying to expand the self’.

The title, ‘most of him’, could be taken a clichéd romantic love poem, something related to Dallas or Dynasty, perhaps a power ballad penned by Tim Rice for Barbara Dickson and Elaine Page. At its most cheesy potential, a woman trying to own a man, dramatic, possessive love. Lee takes this assumption somewhere else entirely, thus expanding the scope of poetry and annihilating cliché.

The poem opens, ‘Most of him is without shadow’, which could mean true, without darkness: light. But there is great darkness here. The poem itself is a shadow, suggesting menace, yes, but also a shadow of another poem, the poems’ other selves, allopoems, or maybe the more traditional or clichéd poem.

‘Good to drain a line of him on the road’. Why ‘good’? Like Edson, Lee is gleefully vague where more meaning is usually given. Lee is playing games with peoples’ expectations of poetry and meaning. The line ‘It would be good to set him down’ reenforces the detached violence and the anti-emotion.

‘Most of him crowds into other people’ sounds sinister, ominous. ‘Most of him unthinkingly cuts his throat’ even more so. This shocking, violent image shows a violence without thought. In many ways the most dangerous violence. There is boredom, an anti-feeling and dispassion, here. Subverting expectations of both women and poetry.

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ee succeeds in her mission to ‘expand the scope of poetry’ by drawing from a ‘non-literary’ language pool and makes much other poetry appear so obvious. Colin Leemarshall’s translation pushes far beyond the normal collaboration of translation and an enhanced version of Lee Sumyeong is what we are left with. Lee Sumyeong’s choices mirror our confusing lives and society and do not provide us with neat answers. The undoing of cliché is more important than meaning, but what is truth and meaning anyway, the poems ask. Lee, like many of us, is bored with the old and makes the new for readers who are looking for exactly that. Bringing language poetry and neo-modernism, with its fragmentation of image, stability, time, meaning in to already subversive and exciting Korean surreal poetry scene, is what makes Lee stand out among the crowd, leaving readers all very thankful for Colin Leemarshall coming across her book that day, and making poems that are just like, nothing.