서울 / Seoul by Cho Byung-Hwa, manuscript translations by Jeremy Ingalls

The arresting cover image—what looks like flames scrawled with crayon—signals the complexity of the poems inside 서울 / Seoul by Cho Byung-Hwa. The work is clear, “accessible,” while also bearing urgent testimony only a handful of years after the U.S. war in Korea: “Oh, the satellites have fallen like fragments of broken doctrine.” Ultimately, though, I chose this book for the way it testifies to the intimacy of correspondence between poet and translator. From the typescript letter carefully folded and kept behind the book’s front cover to the translations by Jeremy Ingalls written by hand in blue ink onto the book's very pages, this artefact is itself a tiny archive of the ways writers and translators leave one another marked. —Farid Matuk

Cho Byung-Hwa. 서울 / Seoul: Poems. Manuscript translations by Jeremy Ingalls. [Seoul: Sungmoonkak Publishing Company, 1957?]