Featuring Lee Jenny, Cynthia Cruz, Henry Goldkamp, and More
The poet Stine An, who is at the very least a finalist for best author/translator photo, is the translator of the recent poetry collection Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung. An received both NEA (rip) and PEN/Heim Translation Grants for her translation of Yoo’s Today’s Morning Vocabulary, published just last year. The newer volume is comprised of prose poems, penned beginning in February 2020, each with “Story” in the title (eg. “Story—Surface Patterns”). In her translator’s note entitled “Story—Clew,” An meditates on the notion of “story” alongside the collection’s first poem about Yoo’s grandmother singing while loosening yarn. An defines story as “a ball of yarn, a skein, a string—something with a beginning and an end that can transform… something infinite, like a circle or a loop.”
A story is something we follow, a thread—but it can also twist into any shape the storyteller desires, making for a potentially wild journey. Or it can be a way out, as with Theseus, “to guide him through the corridors of the Labyrinth.” (“Clew” is a synonym for skein—and a homophone of “clue.”) The titular rabbit of White Night Rabbit Worries is white with red eyes and, as with Alice in Wonderland, makes sporadic appearances. At times it’s wearing a beret, others asking for a nose scritch. Yoo, in the collection’s last poem, explains, “Like scenes from inside a kaleidoscope, stories repeat and reappear.”
