Obscurely Obfuscated Obscura
The direct experience is now done by the camera and the screen. Experiences one had to translate for oneself every day, it seems, have evaporated and are no more.
This semester, the students were given an assignment titled ‘Obscurely, Obfuscated, Obscura.’
For example, after their day was over, they were tasked to write down how events and landscapes had passed by them in obscurity during the day.
How the language of poetry, after hiding in somewhere dim, rides out in the air we breathe making flickering flashes, and how the light breathes in obscurity, staying in motion while riding the language of poetry.
How a gesture, on which it seemed a wandering soul was laid to rest, is nowhere to be found.
How the landscape of the afterlife, obfuscated in the mind, may seem.
How, before riding out in language, after rising out from being submerged under the inner landscapes, the past must go through certain mechanisms before it reappears, and how some of it ends up appearing and how some of it remains hidden.
How the light that was moaning earns the first body of language, that pinkish naked body, in a certain moment, but how the more of it gets laid on the top of language, the more of it becomes obscured.
How the shape of language, before its awakening, before it was divided into image and meaning and sound, may have seemed (was it like an ectoplasm, was it like snot).
One looks at a twilight, thinking that it is beautiful because it has no path, no body, no answer.
Dim is the gesture entering this evening’s words. If there is a perfume one sprays on oneself when one breaks up with the world, then the gesture is as obfuscated as that perfume settling in. The gesture is as obscure as the motions the dead left behind while they lived.
Ghost’s obscure light.
Silence’s obscure light.
Naked body’s obscure light.
Tonight, the dream of n’t shines an obscure light on the brain of n’t.
Author’s Note
If we call this work poetry, then poetry will get mad. If we call this prose, prose will get mad. Poetry rises higher than this, and prose reaches and spreads to lower places. This is minus-poetry, minus-prose. I wondered if I should call this not-poetry-not-prose, or po-prose, because I felt I was insulting both poetry and prose if I called my work either of those things. I thought, maybe I should call them recited prose or mumbled poetry. I have always thought that there are things only poetry can express, and things only prose can express. However, this time I wanted to invent a genre that hangs between those two genres.
Translator’s Note
In the pieces, you will notice that a persona called "n't" appears. That is my translation of 않아 (ahn-ah), which is an adjunctive adverb of negation in Korean, basically a particle that negates the whole sentence whenever it is added in.
Jack Jung studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He teaches at Davidson College.
