That Summer's End: Poems
By Lee Seong-bok
translated by Anton Hur
Thank you to Knopf for gifting me a copy ahead of its August 4th release.
I love translated poetry. It touches my heart in a special way. A translated novel gives you the story. A translated poem gives you someone's soul, and a translator's whole job is somehow to carry that soul across languages without getting in the way of it. Anton Hur does that here. You can feel Lee Seong-bok on every page, and if you look for Hur, you can sense him, but you won't really see him. That's what good translation actually looks like.
You might already know Lee Seong-bok without realizing it. Back in 2022, RM of BTS quietly posted the original Korean cover of this book to his Instagram Stories, with excerpts about how we've let our attention shrink down to whatever fits on a screen. That post helped spark real interest in bringing Lee's work into English, and it followed an earlier collection of his aphorisms that Hur had already translated. Hur has said publicly he's grateful to RM for reviving interest in Korean poetry abroad. However you got here, a BTS story from a few years back or a shelf display next week, I am glad you found Lee Seong-bok.
Lee Seong-bok has spent over four decades teaching creative writing and French literature at Keimyung University in Daegu. In between, he lived in Paris, studying poststructuralist theory alongside the practices of Seon Buddhism. You can feel both of those threads here, an exactness that comes from years of French intellectual training, and a stillness that comes from somewhere else entirely.
The collection moves in sequences, along with standalone poems: letters to someone far away, a run of poems built around trees that start to blur the line between the poet and what he's describing, mountain paths, rivers, commentaries on the I Ching, and poems about his mother running through it all.
The poems about his mother are some of the most direct writing in the book. The grief isn't disguised. It's there for you to experience with him.
He often hides his loss inside something else, a tree, a stretch of water, a letter that never gets sent. I've already reread the tree poems more than once, wondering if the tree was ever just a tree.
I don't want to give away more than that. This is the kind of collection you want to read slowly, poem by poem.
Definitely worth the read.
That Summer's End releases August 4th from Knopf.
Where to purchase
More translated Korean poetry
Winter Night Rabbit Worries by You Heekyung translated by Stine An
Lady No by Kim Hyesoon translated by Jack Saebyok Jung
