This is an aphorism from my aphorism book.
동에 번쩍 서에 번쩍
dong.e beon.jjeok seo.e beon.jjeok
east-AT gleaming west-AT gleaming
[…Like] a glint in the east, [then] a glint in the west
This references someone who flits around, not really leaving a trace. “Quick and aimless feet” is the phrase used in the aphorism book. I can’t think of an English language equivalent, at the moment.
I rather like the utter fail that is google-translate’s offering: “Standing gleaming in gleaming copper.” That is poetic but not quite what was intended.
This aphorism makes me think of wizards, or ghost stories.
In fact, this reminds me of the ghost story I sometimes tell my students. It’s not really something that happened to me, although it has some germs of truth in the events of the night I died.
What I did was modify and alter some details, and focus in on several details that aren’t part of the canonical telling, and craft a narrative appropriate for children, with a frisson of weirdness and supernatural. Koreans enjoy ghost stories, and I felt that having my own ghost story would be a good idea.
I thought I had written this story down in my blog at some point in the past, but it seems that I did not, based on searching around the archives a bit. I was going to put a link to it, but since I did not, I’ll have write it for my blog and post it in the future, at which point I’ll put a link here.
[daily log: walking, yes, walking, walking, walking, well, not really that much.]