Beautifully rendered in translation is the emphatic drive of Mun’s poem. Leveraging expressions like “I tell you!” and other turns of phrases particular to English, Warnick draws out some of the finer points of the poem’s message, in a true demonstration of how translation can be more than just the melancholic transfer of parts. Instead of being fettered by the limitations of its operation, how might translation enact the encounter between English and Korean to create new insights? Where Mun evokes the shamanic household practice of keeping shinjudanji (신주단지)—a small vessel regarded as a dwelling place for a deity—and tending to it with extreme care and devotion in order to ensure the auspices of the deity for one’s family, the line strikes a comparison between this tradition of devotion to shinjudanji and the political “ideologies, or philosophies, or systems” that sustain Korean division; here, the translation offers the creative analog of “totem” for this complex reference. Attention to the metaphors of exchange, like heat and touch, that seem to indicate the possibility of an embodied, languageless bond, is complemented to great effect by the choice to translate something like han ma-eum  (한 마음) as “one mind,” though the word ma-eum could just as well be translated as “heart.” Such careful choices demonstrate the translator’s sensitivity to the parallel forces of intellect and feeling in Mun’s work. In another moment, where the Korean repeats Mun’s invented phrase “to live history,” the translation makes the insightful distinction between “making history”—a posture that seeks glory first—and the poet’s commitment to “living history,” a process described by way of the poem’s imagery as a struggle of seemingly improbable proportions.

Swearing allegiance, sticking your neck out following orders
And earning a medal— do you think this is making history?
It isn’t, I tell you, it is not!
To live history
Is to change night into day, day into night,
Is to overturn sky and earth, earth and sky, 
Is to kick a boulder into pieces with bare feet (…)

“Sleep Talking Which Isn’t Sleep Talking” was published in the April 1989 issue of the journal Minjok minju undong  (민족민주운동), and Mun dates the poem thirty minutes into the new year, as if announcing a dare. In March of the same year, Mun Ik-hwan would make the historic trip to North Korea to meet with Kim Il Sung and advocate for a three-step plan for “unification by the federal formula” (연방제 통일). In retrospect, we are struck by the way the oblique conditional tense mingles with the implicit futurity of the repeated sentence endings –geoji (-거지) throughout the poem. One can imagine the readers of his poem, a month later, shaking their heads, but without recourse to disbelief—Mun had already turned the hardly believable into a historical event. When his narrator cries, “I don’t just speak of history, I tell you that I’m living it!” he means it in the most literal sense.

Mun was arrested and imprisoned on returning to southern soil for violation of the National Security Law. Many consider Mun’s visitation to have paved the way for the inter-Korean summit of 2000; and perhaps most fresh in public memory, the 2018 meeting between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un at Panmunjom, where both sides committed to military de-escalation, denuclearization, and the pursuit of inter-Korean economic exchange.

Why read Mun Ik-hwan today? Since its outset, South Korea’s current administration has set itself towards a near total reversal of the strides toward peace made in the 2018 summit, pursuing a confrontational policy towards North Korea and working actively against the agreements established in the Panmunjom Declaration on Peace, Prosperity and Reunification of the Korean Peninsula; at the domestic level, the administration has renewed efforts to militarize the police, and reactivated old, familiar rhetorical turns that bear the traces of authoritarian regimes of the recent past. Just last week, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol evoked the possible threat of a “Hamas-like” North Korean attack as pretext for heightened joint security measures with the US. But the comparison Yoon draws exposes its very figuration of Palestinian and North Korean lives as purely “threat,” showing us how exactly such lives are made ungrievable. Were Mun Ik-hwan alive to see the violent razing of Gaza today, he would no doubt be among the first to remind us that the world is at stake in Palestinian liberation, and that it’s as much entwined with the struggle for inter-Korean peace as it is related to the ongoing Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. “Sleep Talking” speaks from the annals to remind us that the political horizon of believability is ours to enact.