Most nights, Hwang In-suk pushes a procuring cart up and down the steep alleys of her Seoul neighborhood, trailed by stray cats that emerge from shadows to greet her beneath glowing streetlamps and comfort retailer marquees.
Her neighbors have a tendency to think about Ms. Hwang, 64, merely as somebody who feeds cats on the street. Only a number of know that she is a celebrated poet whose work explores loneliness and impermanence within the South Korean capital.
Her many years of writing span a time through which South Korea has cycled by way of a dizzying variety of identities, together with these of a rustic dominated by repressive army dictatorships, a fledgling democracy and, most just lately, an financial energy and worldwide cultural juggernaut.
Ms. Hwang stated her nocturnal cat-feeding routine permits her to quietly observe not solely cats, her favourite muses, but additionally her altering neighborhood and the underclass of a megacity that’s more and more recognized for its flashy exterior.
“I’ve found worlds that I wouldn’t have found if I had not been feeding cats at night,” she stated in a close to whisper on a latest stroll by way of her neighborhood, Haebangchon. The streets had been principally silent apart from the occasional automobile, taxi or supply truck.
In addition to cats and different topics, Ms. Hwang’s poetry paperwork the milieu of comfort retailer clerks, road sweepers and different late-night employees. “I don’t even know his face as we meet only in the dark,” she writes of a newspaper deliveryman in a latest poem referred to as “Don’t Know Where You Live”:
He wouldn’t know my face both however
How come he acknowledges me so properly
We reside at evening
Haebangchon, or Liberation Village, lies close to Seoul’s central practice station and what was as soon as the principle U.S. army base within the nation. The neighborhood was carved out of a hillside forest after the top of World War II, when Korea emerged from Japanese colonial rule.
Many of the individuals who settled there have been North Korean refugees who arrived throughout or after the Korean War, stated Pil Ho Kim, an skilled on South Korean cultural historical past at Ohio State, whose father grew up within the neighborhood after fleeing the North.
In the many years after the warfare, South Korea skilled dramatic upheavals, together with speedy industrialization, a presidential assassination and a bloodbath of pro-democracy demonstrators. So did Haebangchon, a spot initially often known as a “moon village,” a time period for city slums constructed on hillsides.
In the Nineteen Seventies, South Korean financial migrants helped flip Haebangchon right into a hub for small-scale garment factories. It later grew extra residential and fewer working class, and started to draw younger artists. Many artists’ studios had been in flip displaced by cafes because the gentrification continued, stated Cha Kyoung-hee, 38, who has owned a bookstore within the neighborhood since 2015.
Ms. Hwang, who grew up close by and settled in Haebangchon within the Nineteen Eighties, has been quietly observing the main points of those adjustments ever since with a eager eye. She settled on a profession in poetry after finding out artistic writing at a Seoul arts institute and made her debut with a poem, “I’ll Be Reborn as a Cat,” that received a 1984 award for rising South Korean writers. It was the primary of many nationwide literary prizes that she would win over time.
She stated her poetry partly displays her conviction that Seoul is a spot the place the wealthy and poor reside in separate worlds, and the downtrodden are victims of cutthroat competitors.
“They were not willing to cheat others to advance themselves in this society,” she stated throughout a latest stroll, her breath escaping in tiny clouds as she rounded a bend of a darkish, hillside alley. The lights of skyscrapers blinked within the metropolis beneath.
Her poems are inclined to fuse particulars of her nook of Seoul, a metropolis of about 10 million folks, with the feelings of their wry, melancholic audio system. One describes Haebangchon’s roads as main “always uphill/like my life.”
But Ms. Hwang is maybe greatest recognized for poems that make wistful, whimsical observations about cats, and the people who wrestle to know them. She stated about one-fifth of her oeuvre has been cat-related.
For the final 16 or so years, Ms. Hwang has been feeding cats nearly each evening, normally out of recycled instant-rice containers. Each cat has a delegated eating spot — beneath a parked automobile, say, or amongst a restaurant’s rubbish bins. Some strategy her within the method of a well-recognized outdated pal, meowing as they rub in opposition to her legs. Others should be coaxed out of hiding locations with a comfortable psst.
Ms. Hwang stated her cat-feeding routine began when a single stray started turning up, hungry, exterior her condominium. Some of the handfuls of cats she now cares for have names; most she simply calls “pretty.”
“I do this because the cats are waiting for me, and no one else is willing to do it,” she stated flatly. “It’s a duty.”
But her affectionate method with the cats — and her many poems about their quirks and personalities — suggests her relationship with them is greater than perfunctory.
Anne M. Rashid, a professor of English literature who translated a few of Ms. Hwang’s work with a late colleague, Chae-Pyong Song, stated she was significantly keen on this passage from the poem “Ran, My Former Cat”:
I didn’t know the place you got here from.
Always impulsively
you appeared
at a time when no person was round
at a time when time belonged to no person,
hanging in regards to the roof of a rented home
as if from inside my coronary heart,
as if from the sting of the moon
with a small half-cry,
you appeared.
Throughout the poem, which ends with the cat disappearing “to a place where you couldn’t invite me,” the speaker needs to carry or contact her muse however is aware of it’s not attainable, stated Professor Rashid, who teaches literature at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.
“They have a bond, regardless, in their solitariness,” she added.
When Ms. Cha hosted Ms. Hwang for a studying at her bookstore final 12 months, the viewers was unusually numerous for such an occasion, and included former residents of the neighborhood who missed it and needed to listen to descriptions of its earlier incarnations. Some cried once they heard her poems learn aloud.
Ms. Hwang stated she shares a cramped condominium with two ailing, rescued strays, one in all them named Lauren after the Hollywood actress Lauren Bacall. She doesn’t personal a cellphone and has by no means earned a dwelling by way of something apart from poetry.
“She’s not the type of person who tells people who she is,” stated Yang Jung-ok, 60, who owns a restaurant in Haebangchon and has recognized Ms. Hwang for years.
Ms. Yang stated she has lengthy admired her soft-spoken neighbor for spending a lot of her restricted revenue on meals for stray cats. But she solely realized of Ms. Hwang’s poetry from a journalist who accompanied her to the restaurant and talked about in passing that she was an eminent poet.
During the latest stroll, Ms. Hwang appeared shocked {that a} reporter can be thinking about her work, and declined an invite to recite a poem of her alternative. “I can’t say which one would bring a reader joy,” she stated, shortly earlier than midnight.
The people in her poems additionally are inclined to hold low profiles. In “Above the Roofs,” the speaker marvels at how the vitality inside cats’ our bodies sends them hovering within the air to a “vast territory” above rooftops. Then — in a fragile, nearly catlike means — she locations herself of their midst.
In this metropolis the place again alleys have disappeared,
on the again alleys above the roofs,
on these alleys above, so to talk,
gently I place my breath.
Youmi Kim contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com