When Will We Finish This Practice?
Someone in the unit upstairs is playing the piano.
They are practicing a piece that people in this country typically play when they first begin learning piano. From morning to evening, the playing never ceases.
Unless the pianist believes that she will save the world with her piano playing, the incessantly passionate practice remains inexplicable.
n't thinks of a girl locked away in her room all day, focused and unwavering.
No school, no meals, no restroom breaks, only the piano. If she makes a mistake, she replays that section relentlessly until it's perfect. A certain maestro likely underwent the same process. No one can achieve mastery without navigating through this clumsy, obsessive rhythm. Until they overcome these rhythmic waves, no one can embrace the freedom of natural performance. As n't listens to the girl's piano playing, her heart flutters with concern that the girl will repeat her usual error. As the practice nears that part, the heart of n’t starts to vibrate, her fingertips tremble, her head and shoulders develop tics. But the girl upstairs falters again.
Unable to bear it anymore, the roommate of n’t pleads with the upstairs neighbor to cover the floor beneath the piano with soundproof padding.
After a few days, the piano's sound is muffled as if it's enveloped in a quilt.
This change leads n't to listen even more intently to the music. This new, subdued sound touches her nerves more than the previous loud notes. Her head and shoulder tics worsen.
Please adhere to the noise-level regulation hours as stated in our apartment building rulebook, she requests.
The piano can now only be heard from 9 AM to 9 PM.
n't imagines the girl again. Perhaps she's a girl made to feel ugly by the world. A girl bullied by her classmates. A beaten girl. A crying girl. A girl with disheveled hair. Her only friend, the practice song for the piano. A girl who never attends school.
n't weeps in her bed. Even late into the night, her memories can't be found in the bag of her past, replaced instead by the clumsy, simple melody of the piano song. n't's mind can't travel to the past or the future. The piano sound and the memory gaps it causes are all that remain. The bright halo that once encompassed the past seems shattered. Time's gentle flow appears disrupted. n't's times transform into those practice songs. Now, n't seems memory-less, left only with the slow strikes of those clumsy fingers hitting the empty air.
The practice of that famous song induces nausea when she hears the first few notes each morning. Headache. This auditory torture permeates the home's barriers. n't hears it even when she's outside. On nights when the sound ceases, hallucinatory sounds replace it. Not a single moment passes gently. When the sound concludes, anxiety intensifies. It's as if the sound has been implanted into her body. During her lecture, n't starts to mimic the song's score on her desk. She begins to avoid her home, to hate it. The objects in her home seem foreign, those on her desk seem like they belong to a stranger. She spends more time outside. When she does return home, she listens to famous piano tracks in succession. But when that music ends, the practice song bubbles up in her mind, overwhelming any other piano music. Eric Satie's Gymnopédies is nothing more than delicate mist against the thunderous practice song that storms her brain. n't decides to watch TV all day, memorizing all the names of girl group idols. She aims to meticulously fill out their profile dictionary and create graphs depicting their event schedules. Like the girls of this generation, n't strives to fill her memory bank with idols' music and dance, rather than her own memories.
But one midday, unable to tolerate it anymore, she rings the upstairs neighbor's doorbell. The practice song, audible even from the doorstep, abruptly halts when the bell rings. Then, the sound of a chair being pushed. Slippers dragging on the floor. A face appears when the door opens - an elderly woman on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
n't reflects as she lies in her bed that night. She considers the light sleeps of two women, one upstairs and one downstairs, both nearing their respective nervous breakdowns, and the practice song rhythmically punctuating those sleeps.
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.
