Do you know? In late 1990s,there was a fad for making music videosin Seoul like they were short films. Not like a shortwith a spoken dialogue, but like a trailerfor a movie that tells you the whole plotof its movie. Only difference being,those music videos were themselvesthe things they advertised.Ahshinayo was the most expansive productionof this kind; its lyrictranslates like this: Do you knowhow much I loved you then.Why did you not say anything? You ask.My heart aches, and I can’t answer.You don’t have to know everything,just remember this moment. Remember us, and me.The song was so popularthat even I could sing it with my eyesclosed. And I remember howmusic and its lyric were setto an epic fragmentary short about a Korean marinein Vietnam War, and his falling in lovewith a Vietnamese girl. His platoonwhile trying to ambush their enemyuse the girl as a guide through local terrainbut get ambushed by Viet Cong insteadand are massacred. He and the girl die in gutterwith him screaming, “Why is this happening?”(or was he just screaming) againand again clutchingher lifeless body. It ends with a codaabout some 5,000 Korean men who losttheir lives in Vietnam. I learned laterhow South Korean kill-death ratio was 24 to 1and how they viewedtheir participation in the conflict as paying backthe blood debt to Americans who fought for freedomfrom communismin yet another war before.And how for every 1 My Laithere were 43+ done by Korean mercenaries.And I know the song very well.I didn’t have to look up the lyricto translate it.
Ahshinayo
My poem Ashinayo shares its title with the famous Korean song from the end of the last millennium. If my memory is correct, the music video appears just as described in the poem. I’ve often been troubled by how those who have been brutalized can, in turn, brutalize others. This poem was spat out in bitterness at being part of that violent cycle.
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“Ahshinayo” from HOCUS POCUS BOGUS LOCUS: by Jack Saebyok Jung.
Published by Black Square Editions on March 15, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Jack Saebyok Jung.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (Black Square Editions, 2025). A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he co-translated Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books), winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize. He teaches at Davidson College.
"Jack Saebyeok Jung’s poetry, with its perpetual metonymic adjacency, draws beautiful and radiant patterns of curves. Within the house of memory, those spirals revolve, and as time and space are swept into them in a nonlinear flow, a multi-layered vortex called a poem takes off. Inside this vortex lives a pure-hearted youth, gazing directly at the poet. The speech of the youth animates language as though it were a living organism. Together, they destroy this universe no one knows, emitting a light of annihilation. In Jung’s poems, there is no center, no periphery. All sensory images, factual images, and the active images of events coexist on equal footing. The images in his poetry, much like Mallarmé’s 'spiderweb,' spun by a spider brimming with mucus for building structures, continuously contract and expand, absorb and reflect, close and open in equal measure. The action of folding and unfolding makes each poem not a mere state of existence, but rather a strange site of becoming. Thus, the poems in this collection, composed of the overlapping and movement of countless singularities set into motion by the poet, become a field where the infinite creation of poetry and the universe is continually renewed."
—Kim Hyesoon, author of Phantom Pain Wings, the winner of 2023 National Book Critics’ Circle Award
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