POETRY
Korean Literature / Korean Poetry
Clouds in the Sky
— POEM by
Sungrye Han
(Translated from Korean)
Eagles crouch patiently,
Waiting for the bird funeral to end.
Solemnly waiting for the human corpse to be torn to pieces.
A net is hung on its beak to clean life,
To eat human flesh.
Their eyes sparkle to erase human traces.
They look elegant and graceful,
Eagles are persistent and cruel,
They eat the flesh of the corpse leisurely.
The custom that gave ethics to animals by humans, and made eagles eat the corpses,
Eaglet chicks eat each other’s siblings.
Aigret also hunts their first prey against their own family,
They devour the youngest and weakest sibling born from the same litter,
The Tibetans entrust the disposal of human corpses to eagles,
To eagles who eat human corpses most cleanly.
The moment the body melts in the flames of sorrow,
The lightning will tear the time of the dead,
The illusion that there is no end, the phantoms that there is a beginning,
Our life is not to read things as they are,
We add observation and imagination to them,
We do not know the end of time or space.
It is wrong to say that life was a festival,
The dead have only their own time,
Fragments of time are scattered under people’s feet,
Time has stopped like a cart with no wheels.
We were all friends of the clouds.
….
(Self-translation from Korean)
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Sungrye Han
Sungrye Han, born in 1955, is a representative of Korea. She hails from South Korea. She is a poetess, translator (Japanese – Korean) and (Korean – Japanese), and Adjunct Professor at Sejong Cyber University in Seoul, South Korea. She majored in Japanese language and Japanese literature at Sejong University and earned her master’s degree in Japanese studies at Sejong University’s Graduate School of Policy Science. Her poems express Korean tradition, life and death, sadness, pain and anguish in surrealism, modernism and avant-garde forms.
Work:
Sungrye Han has published 4 books of Poetry: “The Beauty in a Laboratory”, “Smiling flowers” in Korean; and “The Sky in the Yellowish Red Korean Skirt”, “Drama of the Light” in Japanese. She has also published historical essay “The Formation of the Ancient Nation in Japan and Japanese oldest anthology Manyo-shu” and so on.
Sungrye Han has also translated and introduced Korean and Japanese poems in literary magazines between the two countries since 1990. Her translation work reaches to more than 200 volumes of poems, novels, essays, poetry anthologies, books for children, humanity books, self-enlightenment books and scientific books. Korean textbooks used in Korean middle Schools and high schools contain 40 kinds translations of her for educational purposes.
Awards:
Sungrye Han’s works have earned her the Newcomer Award of “Poem and Consciousness”, Korea’s “the Heonanseolheon Literature Award” and Japan’s “Sitosozo Award”, Korea’s “Poetry Slam Translation Literature Award.”
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