“Why were poets the first to be rounded up, punished, and purged?” my friend asked. I couldn’t tell whether the question was meant for me or merely spoken to the night air. Although the words were uttered in English, for some reason I remember them in Korean. We were first-year students then, strolling through Harvard’s red-brick campus buildings on an autumn evening. The lamplight leaking from dorm-room windows cast a glow on my friend’s face, already fading in my memory. I kept replaying something our creative-writing professor had said just hours earlier: under a dictatorship, the first to be seized and made to vanish are journalists and poets. We had been reading and discussing the harsh lives and powerful verses of Polish poets.
My friend’s question, echoing the professor’s remark, sent me into a reverie. Back then, Harvard had no course devoted to the formal study or teaching of modern Korean poetry. During a creative-writing workshop, the professor mentioned that translating Korean poems could naturally sharpen one’s own verse, so I began reading Korean poetry on my own. It was virtually self-study. In Korea these poems and poets would be familiar to most students by high school, yet to me, a Korean American, everything felt fresh and beautiful. Since immigrating to the United States after finishing elementary school, I had rarely engaged with Korean writing in any sustained way.
My mother carried me on her back when we immigrated to the United States, and in that unfamiliar land she had to let go of many things, including the literary writing she had cherished for so long. Even so, she had read a great deal, so whenever I asked about Korean poetry and poets or begged for recommendations, she introduced me to many fine poems. The translations I attempted back then strike me now as embarrassingly clumsy, and I blush to remember how I plastered those awkward versions all over my social-media accounts and urged friends to read them.
Yet the more I read and translated, the more one fact hit me squarely: an unavoidable gulf between the American poets I was studying and their Korean counterparts. Their birth years were roughly the same, but almost every Korean poet already had a death date beside their name, while many of the American poets were still alive and writing with vigor. Most Korean poets had died before reaching thirty or fifty—cut down by poverty, illness, imprisonment, or simply vanishing without a trace. I hadn’t yet grasped the parallel suffering and solidarity that linked Polish and Korean poets, but I think this is how I answered my friend.
“Poets are the kind of people who can’t help but say what must be said. If those in power don’t want to hear such words, isn’t it only natural that they wipe the poets out?” Yet my clumsy answer clearly failed to satisfy him; his face showed open doubt. “But why bother,” he shot back, “when no one is going to read them anyway?” His words landed blandly in the middle of the autumn night. I still don’t know exactly why they hurt. Maybe it saddened me that a friend from our own poetry workshop held such a bleak view of poetry. In the United States a poetry collection is considered a “success” if it sells a mere thousand copies; the readership for American verse is tiny, and translations draw even less notice. And yet I was falling ever deeper into the dream of introducing Korean poems in English. Perhaps I wanted to lodge some unspoken complaint against that indifference.
We could, of course, speak about the beauty of language, the importance of cultural exchange, and the ideals world literature should strive for, yet my deepest motive lay elsewhere. I burned with anger over how unjustly those Korean poets had lived and died, and I wanted to release that bitterness for them. By translating their work into English—the language read by people all over the world—I hoped to proclaim, “In this corner of the earth there were voices that were crushed for saying what had to be said.” In that imperious English, perhaps the poems would echo in a few more hearts. Maybe even those of you who “eat well, live well, and live long” could feel a flicker of pain, if only for a moment, through these translated lines. That, I think, was the dream of my younger self.
Of course, not every Korean poet lived a life of unblemished virtue and departed this world adorned with medals. Even so, when my friend casually tossed out “No one will read them anyway,” the remark struck me as an unanswerable challenge and became the seed of my own question: why should I write and translate poetry at all? It also led me to ask why poets, who supposedly draw so little attention, posed a threat to oppressors on par with journalists. If truly no one reads them, why not leave them be? What could make a single poet so frightening?
As time passed and my earlier questions faded, the phrase “the poet’s insignificance” resurfaced in my mind. One day, while working as a literary translator, I was talking with a Korean poet I admired. We were comparing the starkly different literary systems and landscapes of Korea and the United States in the twenty-first century. I confessed that I felt a blend of surprise and odd envy when I saw Korean poets wrestling with commissions from literary journals, forced to finish poems by strict deadlines. The poet let out a small laugh and said:
“The deadlines in literary journals are mostly for show. Even if a poet misses one, the seasonal issue will still go out. Truth is, whether we write or not, no one will read it anyway.”
Then she went on:
“There is no creature in the world more trivial than a poet. We’re nothing but a handful of ash.”
Those words lingered with me for a long time. Why, then, would anyone stake their life on writing poetry?
Over the years I’ve come to see: because a poet seems so insignificant, they can, paradoxically, become the most feared presence of all.
Poetry is one of the most clandestine ways a poet reveals themself. It is not the voice of a crowd but a sound that slips out like a soliloquy behind a closed door. That voice applies no ornament, offers no explanation; it simply follows the grain of sensation. Rhythm arrives before words, and the resonance of sound reaches the heart ahead of a sentence’s logic.
Poetry does not scratch the surface of life. Instead, it traces its way down the deep fissures of the heart. There we set aside the identity society has named for us. What remains is the unpolished being, the sensory self that existed before we learned speech, a quiver perhaps older than memory.
That quiver condenses and bursts forth in a single line. To capture that instant, the poem pares away countless noises. What survives is a handful of words, yet those words stand in such taut relation that they can stay upright only by leaning on one another. They appear motionless, but within, they are in constant motion. In that motion the self returns to the senses it possessed before donning its shell.
A poem does not ask questions; it summons the self we have forgotten. A poem is a declaration: this is the voice I possess, this is how I have heard the world. And in that moment of confession, the world lends an ear for an instant. In that fleeting span, we return to our own center—as though it would be fine if no one heard, yet with a sincerity meant for someone who must.
I believe it is precisely at this point that poetry’s “triviality” is upended into its most potent form of resistance. On the surface, poetry may seem quiet, personal, far removed from overt criticism of the system. Yet that very quality makes it all the more threatening to oppressive societies or dictatorships. Poetry speaks not merely in “words” but in sensations that lie outside the system’s reach. Institutions and power crave clear categories, identities that can be controlled, language that serves a function. Poetry, however, blurs boundaries, attends to unnamed feelings and ambiguous perceptions, and gives voice to a mysterious autonomy that erupts from within an individual. This autonomy cannot be explained, manualized, or commanded.
In an oppressive society, “identity” is something the state or ruling elite wants to pin down—citizen, man, woman, worker, patriot, enemy. Poetry, however, declares: “I am myself.” And that “I” can never be bound to a single definition. In the gaps of language, in the fissures of meaning, the self keeps shifting and trembling. To the regime, such a wavering voice is unsettling. The system demands certainty, but poetry harbors doubt. The system imposes silence, yet poetry insists on speaking, even if only as a whisper to itself. The system glorifies the totality of itself, while poetry elevates the individual voice.
Naturally, these reflections on poetry’s social role have resurfaced because I now find myself moving through a dark era in American life. Watching Trump’s U.S. administration antagonize universities, arrest students for voicing political views at odds with the government, eliminate funding for the humanities and sciences, enact bewildering tariff policies, hunt down immigrants of color to confine them in inhumane conditions, and defend regimes that wage wars massacring civilians, I can’t help thinking that American democracy—once seemingly unshakable—could collapse in an instant. In such a country, I am compelled to reconsider the place that “insignificant beings” called poets might occupy, and my own role in translating Korean poems into English and carrying the lived experience of those poets across the language divide.
With Trump back on the scene, and with the Hollywood celebrities, news anchors, and newspapers that once condemned him as casually as eating breakfast now keeping nervously quiet, I’ve come to see how economic standing and the fervor of those who idolize him force everyone to look out for their own survival. Yet for those who have no path left except poetry, who cannot live without writing and cannot even imagine another choice, that very “triviality” turns into a weapon. A poem requires no printing press; sometimes it spreads simply because a few lines are memorized and passed along. Kill the poet if you must, you still cannot erase words that have already flown out into the world.
In one class a poet-professor copied a poem by hand, then crumpled the sheet and tore it to pieces. “You can destroy the material thing,” she said, “but the poem remains untouched inside me.”
Perhaps American poets, too, will one day discover—or rediscover—that this “triviality,” this spark of life no bigger than a handful of ash, can still grow hot again. Today’s U.S. administration might prove only a passing episode, yet whatever legacy this president, this government, and this convulsive culture leave behind, those who must speak must keep speaking. When that moment comes, imagine twentieth- and twenty-first-century Korean poems in translation, filled with yearning for human dignity and democracy, lending a voice to the marginalized, approaching American poetry like a guide, a friend offering a hand. Like Virgil leading Dante through the Inferno, they could serve as a slender but unbroken thread. In that light, translating poems that “no one reads” may not merely be worthwhile; it may be imperative, especially for someone like me, who has somehow become a trivial translator of trivial verse.
On that dim-lit night when we strolled together talking about poetry, my friend’s face, and even his name, has all but slipped from memory. The classes where professors shared beloved poems, the ways those poets were once treated, have grown hazy as well. I am no longer sure why I began to write or translate poetry in the first place; everything survives only as scattered shards. I turn back to a past built of accumulating fragments. Like Benjamin’s “angel of history,” I face away from the future with wings outspread, driven by the storm blowing from the dawn of humankind, while before my eyes layer upon layer rise nothing but fragments of memory.
The works Korean poets left behind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and those of American poets as well, are fragments. Yet every so often a fragment flashes. That flash is the “soul,” the ghosts housed inside these shards of verse. They carry, intact, the stories the poets never managed to unfold in life. We cannot rescue those poets, but we can become the people they once needed. Everything begins with reading, and for me, reading poems is the most direct path. To translate a poem is to hope those ghosts will settle into the English words I write.
At first, I translated almost as though begging the writers and readers of great powers to “please pay attention.” Now I translate for solidarity. I have come to believe that poetry translation is the path by which those ghost-like shards, gleaming amid past failures and sorrows, can meet the comrades they need today. As I move forward, I too may collapse, whether under oppression or my own shortcomings, but in this moment I hold to this conviction, and I want to labor until it ripens into true faith. So even now, I go on writing poems and translating poems, repeating the two until the line between writing and translation all but disappears.
Yet the further I progressed in translation, the more I realized just how extraordinarily difficult it is to carry over, “as is,” the rhythm and sound of one language, and the history and emotions contained within its sentences, into another. After feeling the full weight and complexity of that task, I began introducing Korean poetry to the English-speaking world under the name “Jack Saebyok Jung.” In that process, one narrative image keeps resurfacing, so often that I cite it in interviews and lectures: the scene in Virgil’s Roman epic The Aeneid where Aeneas carries his father Anchises on his back.
When Troy falls, Aeneas hoists his aged, ailing father onto his back and, with his young son beside him, turns away from his collapsing homeland toward an unknown land. In the chaos, he fails to look after his wife and loses her forever; when he turns back and reaches for her, only her ghost flickers beyond his grasp. I have always felt that this scene aptly captures the very nature of translation. Even when we wish to carry the original text, something like a living being, to a place of safety, we cannot bring it over whole, and that inevitability is tinged with sorrow. Our outstretched hands cut through empty air in helplessness, yet the translator’s lot is to strive to call over as many of those “ghost-like words,” those utterances that longed to remain, as possible.
As I noted earlier, when I translate poetry, the distinctive cadence, tone, and grammar of modern Korean verse rarely spring to life in English. What I must carry on my back is not merely a bundle of meanings but also the breath and historicity the original holds. The loss that inevitably occurs while crossing linguistic and cultural borders remains a translator’s perpetual assignment—and sorrow. Yet why can’t I stop? Like Aeneas advancing with his father on his shoulders even after Troy has fallen, the urge to pass along poems that “no one reads” to someone—anyone—keeps the translator’s feet moving forward.
The very power of a poem that “no one is likely to read anyway” is what makes it so frightening. The instant words are spoken and heard, or passed from mouth to mouth, poetry spreads like an immaterial spirit. Overturn every printing press, burn every sheet of paper: once the words are loose, they cannot be erased. That is why oppressors fear poets. History has shown again and again that when journalists and poets refuse to let go of what must be said, that seemingly trivial language can spark real changes that shake lives.
Even here in the United States, the country I now inhabit, censorship and pressure have appeared in forms utterly unlike those of past dictatorships. In such a climate I continue walking the path of “crossing over,” carrying on my back the priceless words Korean poets have left behind and bringing them into the English-speaking world. Someone might ask, “Why bother, when no one may read them?” Yet I believe that even in the very moment a poem seems unread, it still holds the power to guard a person’s freedom. Ultimately, that faith is what drives me forward.
Just as Aeneas turned back again and again, crying out to grasp the wife he had lost, I, too, endlessly lament the pieces that slip away in translation. Yet even that loss is part of the journey, a translator’s destiny in carrying over the words that must be spoken. Though I repeat this incompleteness and frustration, I keep striving to summon, even once more, the original’s spirit into a new language. In a way, it is a desperate struggle to keep the voices of Korean poets, voices that vanished into the maelstrom of history, from ever going out.
So today, too, I read, write, and translate poems. I believe translation is the act of crossing with a text rescued from a collapsed world so it can take root in new soil, sometimes like a child carrying a parent on their back, sometimes like a parent cradling a child in their arms. Perhaps to the vast, unfamiliar land called America, or to readers who pretend that “no one reads” poetry at all. However rough the path, even if I falter, I must keep walking, because the Korean poets I have met and loved, and the language they left behind, are riding on my back. Or perhaps I, a trivial being, am the one clinging to them as we barely traverse rugged ground together. Hoping that this humble language will someday glimmer, will reach someone, I diligently take Aeneas’s steps once more today.
