Flatfish - Ditta: Korean Humanities in Translation by Moon Tae-Jun & Tae-Jun Moon

About the Book

In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author's exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon's poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples.

English-Korean Bilingual Edition
​영-한 이중언어판

Book Synopsis

In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author's exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon's poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples, as the collection explores individual experiences within the context of a search for understanding a greater whole.

While Korea is certainly the setting of these poems, the works remain largely free of cultural-specific imagery and are, instead, naturalistic or universal. This first bilingual edition is a critical resource for students, poets, translators, and general readers alike.

English-Korean Bilingual Edition
영-한 이중언어판

Review Quotes

"In these illuminating translations, Moon's vision penetrates human and nonhuman nature alike, simultaneously. In poem after poem, as the distinctions typically required to organize and navigate our world fall away, a singular, wildly fresh experience of being opens, as if our individual skins were not skin, but humanity's collective eyelid."--Ed Bok Lee "American Book Award-winning author of Whorled and Mitochondrial Night"

"Moon's poetry looks into the abyss of great losses that Korean society has missed or overlooked amidst the violent material and spiritual upheavals of the past century. In his poems, the relationships humans have with the things around them determine who they are. Between you and me, between you and things, we are safe in the mind that bridges the gap. Moon's poems show that without this connection, human life becomes empty."--Young-Jun Lee "director of the Research Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul, South Korea"

"From a wild persimmon tree next to a tin-roofed house to a waning crescent moon being filled like well water, Flatfish transports us into an irresistible world. Park's translation captures a shifting landscape and the poetic voice that asks and answers the question, where will we go from here?"--Su Cho "author of The Symmetry of Fish"

About the Author

An emerging voice in South Korean literature, MOON TAE-JUN has published a number of poetry collections in Korean (Crowded Backyard, Barefeet, A Shadow's Development, and more). In poems that range from short, broken lines to longer prose-like forms, Moon Tae-jun evokes a sense of longing, as if searching for moments in the past that help inform the present.

BRANDON JOSEPH PARK is a lecturer in the Korean Program at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, and in the Writing Program at Rutgers University - Newark. He is the co-translator of You Call That Music?!: Korean Popular Music Through the Generations.