“These Evenings Tidying Up in My Drawer,” by Han Kang: the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature is also a great poet
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Han Kang in Paris, September 6, 2023 JF PAGA/GRASSET
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Review This first translated collection gives the opportunity to discover the poetic work of the 2024 Nobel Prize winner for literature, so many texts that scream the pain behind an apparent purity. ★★★★☆
Until now, Korean Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, was known in France for her novels, including "The Vegetarian" and "Greek Lessons." This first translated collection offers an opportunity to discover her poetic work, texts that scream pain behind an apparent simplicity. In Kang's work, melancholy is petrifying, contemplative, whether it comes from a "small white pebble," a candle ( "I stare at the pupil of the flame/Eye/Bluish/Heart-shaped") , or the works of the painter Mark Rothko: "That's roughly what you find/In a soul when you cut it in two."
Verses frozen by existential angst or trauma. The poet evokes maternal helplessness ( “Soon, alas/You will realize/That all I can do/Is remember […]/The passing of time” ) or perhaps the little-known massacre on Jeju Island in 1948, the subject of her sublime novel “Impossible Farewells”: “I spoke to her of this bloody silence/Of the ice I still had at the back of my throat/To the bird that cried…
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