“Despair gives birth to craft, and craft is what makes us despair.”

An interview with the poet and translator Jack Jung on the work of the great Korean modernist poet Yi Sang; a bit about Keith Jarrett's stroke and Tolstoyan pacifism; and some links.

Our brilliant friend Jack Jung is a poet and translator. Michelle met him two years ago at the University of Iowa through a mutual friend, and was impressed by his self-effacing humor, his love for Milton, and knowledge of tarot cards.

Jack is one of the translators of a new collection of work by the great Korean writer Yi Sang, released last month by Wave Books. Yi Sang is considered the most influential avant-garde poet of Korea’s colonial period, when a regime of cultural repression and censorship was imposed by the occupying Japanese government. Born in 1910, Yi trained as an architect and worked for the government-general of Japan, winning several major architectural prizes. At the same time, he fell in with a leftist experimental writing group, the Circle of Nine. Influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, he incorporated equations, diagrams, drawings, and other devices into his poetry and prose. In 1936 he moved to Tokyo, where was soon arrested for “ideological crimes.” He died the…