Lee Si-Young was born in Kurye, South Cholla Province, in 1949. He graduated from Sorabul Art College and also studied Korean Literature in the Graduate School of Korea University, Seoul. He was the award-winner in the Poetry Division of the Spring Literary Awards of the Chungang Ilbo in 1969. He has published eight volumes of poetry, including his first volume Manwol (Full moon) in 1976, Kirun molda chinguyo (It's a long road, my friend, 1988), Isul maech'in norae (Song moist with dew, 1991), and Muni (Pattern) in 1994. He has been on the editing board of Ch'angjak kwa pip'yongreview since 1980. He teaches in Chungang University.
 

At first Lee wrote anecdotal, narratorial poems focussed on the pain of the poor and marginalized. Recently, his poems have moved towards a more suggestive, epigrammatic style.From the beginnning, his poems have combined a strong note of social concern with a refined verbal art that transforms the suffering experienced by so many in daily life into a poetic memorial transcending the limits of realism. Little-known, even in Korea, his work seems particularly attractive to a world readership in search of specifically Korean treatments of specifically Korean experience.

 

 

Tell me, wind, who is in your land?

Are there vast shadows

that come down at sunset and rattle the door latch?

Are there aged mothers who open the back door and cough?

Is there a glow of fireflies bobbing all night in bamboo groves

then fleeing away to the ends of the earth?

Are there fathers there?

Tell me, wind, are there no faces in your land?

Are there not even footprints poised motionless?

Are there no silent eyes piercing the undergrowth?

Is there no future land a trembling heart can reach?

Tell me, wind, is there no one, no one in your land?

 

Late evening, in front of Yongsan station.

I rather think that the girl who tugged at my arm just now, 

then abruptly let go and vanished, was Chong-im,

who used to come first in the relay race and win a rice-pot 

at every sports festival.

Long hair covering the scar on her brow, swift feet,

couldn't attend school but when sports-day came 

she was excited, more excited than I was.

She used to take the lunch from Manduk the laborer's chige,

put it on her head, and come running to me with it.

As she weeded the sorghum field or chased away the birds,

if she caught sight of me

she would dash up with muddy hands and firmly tie

the blue cloth bundle holding my books.

Shelling peas, she would say: Aren't they good? Aren't they good?

Her throat shone white as she looked heavenward and laughed.

She had no father, no mother, but said she wasn't sad, 

as she let the grasshoppers she had caught fly free.

One year in spring when she climbed high into the hills 

to grub up fresh shoots,

she got bitten on the thigh by a snake. The neighborhood girls

brought her down on their backs,

but she wanted my hand about her pillow, gave me wild berries.

I wonder why she went away?

She'd pick cotton, spin it into thread on the wheel,

spin flax on summer nights to her heart's content,

then in the long winter evenings hunch over her loom

and weave fine cotton cloth with a crash and a thud.

I wonder why she vanished like the wind?

I used to feel that I had only to open the empty kitchen door

and she would come hurrying out with her kindly eyes;

I wonder why she left and never returned?

A rumor went round she was a housemaid somewhere,

report went about she had job in a textile factory,

someone said they'd seen her in a Yongdungpo whorehouse,

but mother never uttered a word in reply.

That girl who grabbed my arm in front of Yongsan station 

at eleven thirty last night, as I hurried to avoid the curfew,

then vanished down a dark alley with rapid steps: that girl. . .

 

The eleven thirty night train, Pigeon class, from Yosu to Seoul.

The name's nice, Pigeon class, the third class train.

Looking up from the floor of the jam-packed aisle,

a young woman questioned me: 'Where can I find Myongil-dong?'

She had a newly-born infant strapped to her back

and on the blanket spread on the floor a boy aged five or six

was sitting with a flushed expression.

'I'm off to find these kids' dad.

He missed last year's farming season, so he left home;

someone told me they'd seen him in Myongil-dong.'

I know that place, Seoul's Myongil-dong;

it used to be as dark as a mining village even at midday,

with public address speakers bawling full blast,

drunks lying sprawled full length,

a place where, when night came, from beneath each low roof

young women's short cries of pain used to emerge.

On that woman's throat too, burned dark by the sun,

where sweet dew from the fields used to flow,

the veins will soon stand out from shouting.

The kid's clean white rubber shoes, washed in the pure stream

in front of their house, will soon be filthy with coal-dust.

But I know something more: the Myongil-dong 

that she is pinning all her hopes on finding no longer exists.

The alleys that used to be full of scrap-merchants, pawn-shops, 

day-laborers, are all demolished and gone,

and in the grounds of Green Mansions that's replaced the old huts

spotless children are prattling away

as they go scampering across green lawns.

The eleven thirty night train, Pigeon class, from Yosu to Seoul.

The young woman opens her bundle, offers me a boiled egg,

and keeps asking me anxiously:

'Where can I find Myongil-dong?'

 

Birds go flying up

in winter's bitter wind;

red beaks gleaming, 

body and soul, the birds go flying up

until there is no great grief left in the village

where blood-tinged smoke lies sleeping;

spurning their souls too firmly fixed to the ground,

they rise above the far-reaching sky,

up into anger.