Dawn - Sochon Park

This is a book of sijo poetry. The library of an American university was trying to get rid of it and offered it to the students before throwing it away. I took it basically for three reasons:

1) I like poetry

2) I had never read poetry from East Asia

3) In addition of presenting the poems in English, The book offers the original versions in Korean plus the romanization and the version with Chinese characters.

I found the book completely uninteresting, but that's probably because the translations were done by volunteers, so probably they are not that good (I do not speak Korean, so I cannot say for sure). Perhaps the original versions are good. At least from a technical perspective, it looks like sijo is quite complicated.

People say that poetry is an universal language. It is not. In fact, poetry might as well be the last reduct of linguistic and national particularities.