Caveat: more substance in our enmities / than in our love

VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

– William Butler Yeats (part 6 from a 1923 longer poem "Meditations in time of Civil War").

Note that the word "stare" here is an Irishism for the bird called starling, I think. And the civil war in question is the Irish war for independence from the UK.

I really like this poem. It combines something deep and symbolic with a very immediate observation of nature in the moment.

Caveat: 아는것이 병

아는것이                  병
know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ sickness
Knowing [is] sickness.
“Knowing is sickness.” It sounds like it could be the title of a Kierkegaard book.
There’s another proverb in Korean that is exactly opposite:
아는것이                  힘
know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ strength
Knowing [is] strength.
“Knowing is strength.” This sounds more like the title of something by Lenin.
It’s interesting to reflect on how these two opposite possibilites start quickly to take on ideological resonances in my mind.
The nominalizing ending -는것 is extraordinarily common. Not only is it used to construct a sort of periphrastic present tense with the copula (-이다), but it also seems to serve as a kind of periphrastic gerund (where the actual gerund is -기 and the more nominalizing -ㅁ). Both proverbs are missing an explicit copula after the second noun phrase, but I think it’s implied by the subject marker on the first. This strikes me as similar to the Russian present tense copula, which is normally absent in actual Russian, and merely implied by the case endings of the nouns.

Caveat: Who’s That Reading My Blog?

I sometimes go and look at a website called feedjit, which allows me to “watch” people as they visit my blog’s web address (i.e. raggedsign.blogs.com [UPDATE: this address is no longer the valid address of my blog, effective late 2018]). It can be interesting to see what brings people to my blog – what sorts of google searches or links they’re following.

I’m honestly not sure why I’m interested in this – perhaps it’s merely a weird sort of vanity, like my students who keep checking to see if their friends have sent them messages on their phone. Certainly, it’s not that I’m interested in “optimizing” my blog or getting more visitors – that’s not at all what this blog is about. So I’m not actually doing anything with the information revealed. I don’t actually have a clue as to what this blog is about.

Well this morning, at just before noon, I saw something truly weird: a North Korean visited my blog. I did a screenshot, unable to believe it was true. Here it is.

picture

I noticed the person probably typed into google something in English combined with the Korean proverb “망건 쓰자 파장된다,” which I wrote about in a blog entry from last year in February. That’s the specific blog entry that google sent them to.

I wonder what the North Korean is looking for? I doubt very much he or she found it on my blog. It’s possible it’s not even really North Korea – it could be a spoofed web address being produced by some proxy server with a strange sense of humor. I don’t know enough about how that stuff works to judge. But nevertheless I feel like this is some weird momentous milestone in the blogular history.

Let us celebrate.

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Caveat: Puentes

pictureEl otro día fuí a la gran librería Kyobomungo en Gangnam, donde había pedido un libro hace unas semanas y que por fin había llegado. Cuando voy a esa librería me gusta echar un ojo sobre su colección de libros en español – a veces me encuentro con alguna novedad inesperada.


Así fue esta vez. Descubrí en un rincón una media docena de libros para niños, y espontáneamente decidí comprar uno. Me gusta la literatura infántil, aunque últimamente he dejado mi costumbre de intentar leer libros para niños en coreano.

De todos modos, el libro que compré me era algo entretenido. Se titula El maravilloso puente de mi hermano, por la autora brasileña Ana Maria Machado. Pues es traducido, pero traducir de portugués al español no es algo tan insólito.

picture

Me gusta el gato negro de cara blanca que le sigue al niño en sus exploraciones.

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Caveat: the pitiless wave

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
– Edgar Allan Poe

I have been sick for almost a month now. I've been to the doctor 4 times since I finally overcame my Korean-doctor-phobia, but I'm not really getting better so far. I'm not sure what's going on. Some kind of infection that the antibiotics are fighting, I presume. On the plus side, 4 visits to the doctor, plus lots of meds, and I haven't yet managed to spend 30 bucks in copays. That's national health insurance for you. But maybe you get what you pay for?

Caveat: 모기 보고 칼 뺀다

모기 보고 칼 뺀다
mosquito see-AND sword draw-PRES
See a mosquito and draw a sword.
This means to get angry at nothing important

I like googletranslate’s version, though: “Subtract mosquito looking knife.”

In the comic frame below, the phrase at left is a slightly more grammaticalized version of the same proverb (remember, grammatical particles in Korean are often optional), while at the right the character is saying 아까운 내 피를… 넌 죽었다! [my precious blood… you’re dead!].

picture

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Caveat: Виктор Цой

Normally I don’t like to “follow up” on blog posts with related blog posts. I have a sort of aesthetic philosophy of “maximal divergence” that I try to follow.


But after my last post about Korean-Russian folk singer Yuliy Kim, I started exploring a whole fascinating world of Korean-Russian musical talent. I discovered Viktor Tsoi (Виктор Цой). This Korean-Russian, born in Leningrad in 1962 (and thus in the same cohort and generation as Medvedev and Putin, interestingly) was quite the phenom in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. One of his songs became an anthem for the protesters who eventually ended the anti-Gorbochev coup and thus ended the Soviet Union and placed Yeltsin in power.

This guy is awesome. He’s all 80’s angst and a master of all kinds of voices and genres adapted to the derivative late Soviet rock scene, Tsoi ended up dying at a very young age, in 1990. I like this guy so much I just downloaded two of his albums.

What I’m listening to right now.

Виктор Цой, “Песня Без Слов.”

pictureТекст:

Песня без слов, ночь без сна,
Все в свое время – зима и весна,
Каждой звезде – свой неба кусок,
Каждому морю – дождя глоток.
Каждому яблоку – место упасть,
Каждому вору – возможность украсть,
Каждой собаке – палку и кость,
И каждому волку – зубы и злость.

Снова за окнами белый день,
День вызывает меня на бой.
Я чувствую, закрывая глаза, –
Весь мир идет на меня войной.

Если есть стадо – есть пастух,
Если есть тело – должен быть дух,
Если есть шаг – должен быть след,
Если есть тьма – должен быть свет.
Хочешь ли ты изменить этот мир,
Сможешь ли ты принять как есть,
Встать и выйти из ряда вон,
Сесть на электрический стул или трон?

Снова за окнами белый день,
День вызывает меня на бой.
Я чувствую, закрывая глаза, –
Весь мир идет на мня войной.

Here is a tribute to Viktor Tsoi by a Korean group called 윤도현 밴드 [Yoon Do Hyun Band], where they sing that famous perestroika anthem translated into Korean.

윤도현 밴드 [Yoon Do Hyun Band], “Группа крови” (корейский вариант).

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Caveat: Юлий Ким

pictureYuliy Kim (Юлий Ким) is a rather famous Russian folk musician, who became popular in the 70’s and 80’s as a “subversive,” performing concerts and making music in opposition to the Soviet authorities. He is also, interestingly, ethnically Korean and was born in the Russian Far East. He worked for some years in the 50’s or 60’s as a school teacher in Kamchatka (the part of Russia across from Alaska, more or less).
There are several hundred thousand ethnic Koreans still living all over Russia, and an equal number in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia (notably Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to where they were deported by Stalin in 1937).
What I’m listening to right now.

Юлий Ким, песни об Израиле (Songs about Israel).
Like a lot of Russian folk music that was tied to the opposition in the communist era, it’s tightly intertwined with various Russo-Jewish traditions. So that’s how you get a Korean singing about Israel in Russian. The Koreans and Jews in Soviet Russia have had similar histories in some respects, not least in their having been persecuted on an ethnic basis for perceived congenital disloyalty. Kim’s father was executed by the Stalinists not long after his birth, for example.
Here is a picture of Kim with Yuri Koval in 1964, that I found on a Russian-language blog.

коваль и ким.1964

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Caveat: Walking. Ant.

I was composing some englynion (englyns – a Welsh poetry style conceptually similar to haiku). Most are terrible, but here are two I liked.
(Poem #9 on new numbering scheme)

my walking is like talking. stories told
to the earth. old stories sing
new from my footsteps. walking.
the ant pushes against stone with small feet.
its silent creeping alone,
until finally it finds home.

Here is a picture I took the other day (a rainy day) looking toward my building – it’s the tallest one in the center in the farthest distance. I live on the seventh floor. Ilsan has rapidly become summery.
picture
picture

Caveat: 니체

오늘의 나를 죽여야 내일의 내가 태어날 수 있다.

오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야 내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다. 새로운 나로 변신하려면 기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다. 너는 네 자신의 불길로 너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라. 먼저 재가 되지 않고서 어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가? – 니체   

This past week, my boss has been even more gnomically obscure and dyspeptically cryptic than usual. One night a few days ago, during a break between classes, he was taping up some of his characteristic aphorisms in a prominent place by the door out of the staffroom, printed in large print on bright goldenrod paper. In Korean, of course.

I said, as is my wont, “What’s that?” I sit close to the staffroom door, so I was just making conversation while he taped his papers up.

At first he was dismissive. “These are not important,” he said. By which he normally means they’re not important to me – being in Korean, I suppose.

But then he reconsidered. “Do you want to understand these?”

I nodded, dubiously.

“Then read them. They could change your life.”

“Gee thanks,” I remarked, though my sarcasm is often lost on the Koreans around me. “Can you send me an electronic copy? That makes it easier for me to research them.”


pictureHe did. So I spent some time the last few days puzzling through some boss-sourced aphorisms.

Lo and behold, I found myself attempting to read Nietzsche, in Korean (see above, at the top of this blog post).

You might think, with all the Nietzsche I’ve read, that I’d be able to figure out the source of the quote – the quote only said “니체” [ni-che = Nietzsche] and didn’t specify a book or volume.  But after a lot of effort at translation, I’m clueless.

The text is definitely Nietzschean in character, and the snippet my boss shared is quite popular on Korean blog sites, but it’s never properly attributed, that I’ve been able to find. I decided to not try to find the source any more, and just give as workmanlike a translation as I can manage.

오늘의 나를 죽여야
today me-OBJ die-CAUSE
내일의 내가 태어날 수 있다.
tomorrow I-SUBJ born-POSSIBLE
“I must die today in order to be born tomorrow.”

오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야
today-GEN me-OBJ completely die-CAUSE
내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다.
tomorrow-GEN I-SUBJ born-PERIPRES
“I must die completely today in order that I am [re-]born tomorrow.”

새로운 나로 변신하려면
new-PPART me-ABL transform-CAUSE
기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다.
existing me-OBJ completely discard-INTENT-PRES
“To transform into the new me I am ready to discard the [currently] existing me completely.”

너는 네 자신의 불길로
you-TOPIC your self-GEN flame-ABL
너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라.
you REFLX-OBJ burn-off-FUTPART resolution-OBJ do-INTENT-TRY
“You must resolve to burn off yourself in your own flames.”

먼저 재가 되지 않고서
firstly I-SUBJ become-SUSP not-AND-THEN
어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가?
how be-reborn-GER-OBJ hope-FUTPART possible have-FUT-SPEC
“[If] I don’t first finish how could I be reborn?”

As long as we’re on a Nietzsche kick, here’s another quote I rather like.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest
loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once
again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought
and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal
hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the
dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that
demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?

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