The small pond of the country house
Grows busy whenever the monsoon comes.
Kong Kwangkyu is a seasoned poet from Korea
Poet Mr. Kong Kwangkyu was born in 1960 in Donam-dong, Seoul, and grew up in Cheongyang County after spending his childhood years in Hongseong and Boryeong, Chungcheongnam-do. He studied Korean Language and Literature at Dongguk University and completed his graduate studies in Creative Writing at Dankook University, where he earned a PhD in Literature. He made his literary debut in 1986 after winning the New Writers’ Prize of the monthly journal Dongseo Literature. His poetry collections include University Diary (1987), Dry Leaves Come Back to Life (1989), A Brutal Affair (1986), Soju Bottle (2004), A Lump of Horse Dung (2008), Breaking Down the Wall (2013), To Paju (2017), Epic Poem: Mount Geumgang (2019), and Epic Poem: The East Sea (2022). He has also published nine volumes of prose and poetry-related works, including the essay collection Clear Sorrow (2016) and the illustrated poetry book White Snow (2016), as well as the handwritten selected poems Face Side Dishes (2014). His poetry has been translated into Indonesian in Pesan Sang Mentari (Words of the Sunlight) (2019). In addition, he has published scholarly and critical works such as A Study on the Creative Methods of Shin Kyung-rim’s Poetry (2005), Ways of Writing and Reading Poetry (2006), the poetry-writing textbook Poetry Writing Classes with Stories (2009), and the critical essay collection The Joy of Reading Women’s Poetry (2015). His poem “Breaking Down the Wall” was selected in 2012 by Korean poets and critics as the best poem of the year. His numerous literary honors include the Silla Literary Award (1989), the Yun Dong-ju Award (2009), the Dongguk Literary Award (2010), the Kim Man-jung Literary Award (2010), the Contemporary Buddhist Literature Award (2011), the Goyang Haengju Literary Award (2012), the DICAPoetry Work Award (2015), the Shin Seok-jeong Literary Award (2017), the Green Literature Award (2020), the Dankook Literary Award (2020), the Han Yong-un Literary Award (2023), and the Dante Literary Writer Award (2025). He was longlisted for the 2019 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize.
Summer Pond
Summer PondFrom the red lotus,
Raindrops spill one by one,
Gathering on green lotus leaves to become white beads.
Making tens of thousands of beads and pouring them into the pond,
The small pond of the country house
Grows busy whenever the monsoon comes.
***
여름 연못
붉은 연꽃에
방울방울 흘러내리는 빗물이
푸른 연잎에 고여 흰 구슬을 만들고 있다오
구슬 천말만말 만들어 연못에 쏟아 붓느라
시골집 작은 연못은
장마철만 되면 바쁘다오
***
A Beautiful Book
One year, I read a beautiful book
Not in a library, but on the street;
Not at a desk,
But in restaurants, on mountain trails, in movie theaters, karaoke rooms, teahouses.
A person like a magazine,
A person like a novel,
A person like a book of poems
I turned each page slowly, savoring it.
It was a book with a beautiful cover and an equally beautiful text.
Pages warm with body heat,
I read them with my eyes,
Turned them with my tongue,
And underlined them with my two feet.
Books do not exist only in bookstores or libraries.
The greatest reading is not always
Scripture or the classics.
A person—
Truly, one beautiful book.
***
아름다운 책
어느 해 나는 아름다운 책 한권을 읽었다
도서관이 아니라 거리에서
책상이 아니라
식당에서 등산로에서 영화관에서 노래방에서 찻집에서
잡지 같은 사람을
소설 같은 사람을
시집 같은 사람을
한장 한장 맛있게 넘겼다
아름다운 표지와 내용을 가진 책이었다
체온이 묻어나는 책장을
눈으로 읽고
혀로 넘기고
두 발로 밑줄을 그었다
책은 서점이나 도서관에만 있는 게 아닐 것이다
최고의 독서는 경전이나 명작이 아닐 것이다
사람,
참 아름다운 책 한 권
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