The Five-Thousand-Year-Old Heart I’ve Swallowed by Choi Jeongrye

The Five-Thousand-Year-Old Heart I’ve Swallowed
Choi Jeongrye
Translated by Brenda Hillman, Wayne de Fremery, Choi Jeongrye

The hooves, the hooves of horses came toward me.
I stared at the ceiling bulb; I stared at the filament in the bulb, at the
little hooves.

No, I didn’t know that they had come clop-clopping into my eyes from
an evening five-hundred—some five-thousand—years ago.

Why did my body miss the desert for such a long time? Why did I
borrow the body of that dying water bird to wander the empty sky?

The heart some five-thousand years old that I’ve swallowed listens to
the sounds of the desert’s sand storm. It watches a deep-blue lake float,
rippling gently.

When morning comes I hear the shrieks of the horses that came
toward me all night as the hobnails are struck at heaven’s village
blacksmith.

Do earthly flowers bloom and fall in thirst for every useless thing
in the world?

I should go on my way but it’s too far; my eyes still endlessly swallow
the horses’ hooves. Do the flowers bloom and fall and bloom and fall
without knowing the endless loneliness
of my bare feet?

MARGINALIA

1.
Day 19 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is Instances by Choi Jeongrye.

2.
What is the boundary between memory and the present? How can we create a world rich with both history and introspection? These are some of the questions I’ve been mulling over while reading this book.

3.
The poems are grounded in the every day—there is so much rich detail on what surrounds the speaker, the interesting things and the mundane things, and yet, at some point, there is also a reaching out toward the metaphysical and how the past can continue to shape and inform our lives.

4.
The book also touches on the cultural shifts that have defined contemporary South Korea, contrasting old traditions with the new and how these changes affect both individual and collective identity. There is also a sense of longing—a desire to hold onto what could slip away. But isn’t life a series of transient events anyhow—I feel like in her heart the poet knows this, and so her writing seeks to weave these moments into the fabric of who we are.

5.
I like the exploration of time, existence, and how all things are interconnected. There’s humour as well as deep philosophical questions. But the way she writes about memory though—there’s a sense of disorientation, as if she is deliberately unsettling my perceptions to make me see the world in a new light. Her afterword touches on this, describing how confusion and loss can spark creativity and lead to new understandings. That if we embrace these moments of uncertainty, it is very possible that we find meaning in the journey itself rather than in any definitive answers.