I love poetry and literature (English more than American~!!) sometimes I can even find myself just before I go to bed reading a poem – these days my absolute favourite is “The Seafarer” an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem written like forever ago. The use of kennings, similes, and all sorts of things always gives me a smile even if its a sad line.
But.
I love Korean. I really do. If its not obvious then I’m doing a shitty job of letting you all know more about me, what I love, and how I express what I love. Then this post I think will do just that, for Korean I don’t know names in poetry, I don’t sense when a line in a novel, or anything is poetic and beautiful in meaning or anything of the sort.
Which hurts just a little bit, because I like it when emotion is visible through words, and you create a scene in your mind for example in English (my native language) I like a poem called Beowulf which is irrelevant to Korean study but look at the few lines I feel like they express something of the story :- “Grendel came groping, brake open the half-mouth, seized hold of a sleeper, bit into its bone-case, drank the blood from his veins, and bolted the body”
To me those lines give me an instant image in my mind, of Grendel biting into someone’s body like the beast he is and drinking all his blood in a swift movement, then leaving him dead, lying on the ground. The end. I understood that and the image in my mind was dramatic and satisfying as it should be.
Now for Korean I don’t pick it up like I do for English, which saddens me so much, I wish it came to me that fast and I understood the meanings behind it like I do with English. The line in question is a line from 신품 1 ; “불에 와 닿는 공기가 뜨겁다” I just saw it as another “sentence” didn’t notice anything about it, apart from the fact it was odd, I mean who says a line like that in everyday life? Thinking to themselves? I certainly don’t, not in English that is.
But I was unsure of its true meaning!
I think going forward it’ll be more of a task of mine to understand the true nature and see the beauty of words, and sentences as I see them in English and not just see them as a ‘sentence’ in a foreign language! ^^
But one thing is nice though, didn’t see the poetry in the sentence but I did understand it lol so I guess its progress either way, one day, one day, maybe in a few months, or just another short year, I don’t know but I hope I do start to understand the beauty of Korean poetry, who knows maybe I’ll love it just as much as I love English literature.
Haha. Well, let me get back to reading my novel, which I am so loving right now just because of the confidence boost I got with that once sentence :-
Wow, your Korean skill is improving!
Wondrous what a few simple words can do to you! :3
this post was also a lot of nonsense in a way but in a way it really really wasn’t :p
I started learning Korean with poems. In fact, I had not read poems recently, and Korean brought me back to my love of poetry.
I noticed very quickly that Korean words didn’t have connotation for me when I started to learn. It was like a blank tablet. The first words I felt connotation for were 선배 and 오빠.
My Korean pen pal Chulmoon will often try to convey the connotations of words to me, with his limited English. For example, he described 할머니 as a warm word that brings soft feelings whenever heard he knows not why. He also told me that the form of the word for mother that he uses with his Mom is one that usually only children use, but he is very close to his mom (he still lives with her).
I found a Korean translation of a Robert Frost poem, and puzzling over the words was my first translation
http://jreidy17.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/poem-stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/
Search the category ‘poetry’ on my site for more Korean poetry.
I have far to go before I can fully appreciate the beauty of Korean language and poetry, but I am on the path to learning it. 🙂 I even have a Korean poet as one of my pen pals. What luck! When he sent me a post card in the mail with a poem he wrote handwritten in Hangul, I was in heaven. Two days ago, a gift arrived from him of a book of haiku by a Korean poet (in Korean). I am so happy.