"Of course I know / that I liked activists more than the movement, / the mood of drinking more than the drink itself, / and that when I was lonely I hummed love songs in a low voice, / not protest anthems that begin with 'Comrades!' / But what on earth does it matter // The party is over," reads a passage from "At Thirty, the Party Was Over."
Choi Young-mi established herself as a poet who defined her era with the 1994 publication of her first collection, "At Thirty, the Party Was Over." The book sold 500,000 copies in that year alone. Readers responded fervently to poems that captured the mood of South Korean society in the 1990s and the sensibility of its younger generation in blunt, unvarnished language. Yet the record-breaking success of that debut was both a blessing and a curse for the poet. In a revised and expanded edition published in 2020, Choi wrote: "I am sending back into the world a collection that has been a blessing, a curse and finally my fate." She added, "Only now do I see why I said what I said."
"In Vain," a selection bringing together Choi's best-known poems — including "At Thirty, the Party Was Over," "At Seonunsa Temple," "Lover," "To the Pigs" and "Monster" — was published recently. It is the first selected volume she has released in South Korea, 35 years after her literary debut in 1992. The book gathers 62 poems drawn from the eight collections she has published to date. The editing and arrangement follow a Japanese selection of Choi's work, "I Lit a Poem and Went Out to the Fields," translated by Jung Hae-ok, a Korean poet living in Japan, and published in Japan in May this year. In an afterword to the Japanese edition, Jung wrote: "Choi Young-mi's poems are written almost entirely in plain language. But throughout the translation, I realized again and again, keenly, that it is precisely plain language that is hardest to carry over."
Choi's poetic world is too wide and deep to sum up in a phrase. At times she sketches everyday scenes of love and parting with restraint. "At Seonunsa Temple," which conveys how hard it is to forget someone you love, is a case in point. "You who smile from far away / you who cross the mountain and go // Flowers / fall easily enough / but forgetting took a long while / a very long while indeed," reads a passage from the poem.
In poems such as "To the Pigs" and "Monster," by contrast, she gives forceful voice to criticism of social realities and resistance to the established order. Choi became embroiled in a legal dispute with the poet Ko Un after publishing "Monster," a poem addressing sexual violence within the literary establishment, and the court ruled in her favor. "Still those greedy pigs do not give up / I have come back from a long journey, old and ill, / without even the strength to rise from where I lie / and they ask me for my pearls / just once more, please, one last time…," reads a passage from "To the Pigs." From "Monster": "Don't sit next to Teacher En, / a poet, K, advised me when I was new to the literary world / because he touches every young woman he sees // (…) // Once you have raised a monster, how / are you supposed to catch it." And from "Memoir of a Femme Fatale": "Before I had even / drawn my blade all the way / he collapsed / He fell / of his own accord."
In the poet's note to the new volume, Choi wrote: "A raindrop struck the window and slid down, so beautiful that my breath stopped. Isn't that instant of rapture what a poem is? I loved you in vain."
Published by Imi Publishing, 156 pages.
