Yoo Heekyung: Three story-poems, translated from Korean by Stine An

Read the translations of this poem on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-3/ Translator Stine An writes in the introduction: Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023), turns to the origins of stories and poetry. Both the tales that get passed on through time around a small fire on a winter night and the tales spun in the dark alone as a prelude to dreaming. When I first encountered Yoo’s story-poems, they felt like fine watercolour etchings from an old storybook—delicate, wistful, and glowing with a quiet warmth. Later, Yoo shared that his work was haunted by Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot (1842), the collection that introduced the modern prose poem to the Western literary tradition and inspired Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. These character-driven prose poems are like intimate one-act plays that flame into existence as visions. Within South Korean poetry, his debut Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Moonji Books, 2011) marked a departure from the experimental avant-garde poetics popular at the time. Yoo’s work as a writer and cultural worker is undergirded by his faith in poetry’s plurality, accessibility, and necessity. Poetry is air: the atmosphere he’s shared through Wit N Cynical, the poetry bookshop and project space he founded in Seoul set to celebrate its 10-year anniversary in July 2026. Yoo approaches translation as literary collaboration, as a form of spooky action at a distance. He has described our work being connected by an invisible thread. I reflected on this thread as I brought my own lyricism and literary experiences to these poems. I imagined myself paying attention to the minute vibrations in the language to portray the tonal shadows and the rhythms of the many voices heard and the gestures felt through the dark. – Stine An