Pirowa Padowa - Paperback

by Archana Madhavan (Translator), Lee Jenny (Author)

From award-winning South Korean poet Lee Jenny, and translated for the first time into English, comes a collection that takes the reader on a journey through a fantastical linguistic landscape exploring the existential yearning and passions of youth through lively wordplay. These fifty-six poems probe universal, yet complex human emotions--from alienation and disappointment to triumph and resolve--whose ever-shifting gradients are difficult to contain within standard language. Instead, Lee sheds conventional grammar and syntax and makes use of repetition, rhythm, alliteration, and other sonic devices to stretch one's notions of language and introduce infinite possibilities of meaning. Indeed the title of the collection, PIROWA PADOWA, transliterated from the Korean, expands beyond its definition and serves as an onamatopoeia for the ebb and flow of Lee's poetic language. In these poems, Lee juxtaposes real-world locations like Peru and Africa with imaginary lands like Kariponia, populating them with indefinable creatures that speak in neologisms--in doing so, she asks us to abandon preconceived notions of any specific place or word to arrive at our own interpretations.

Author Biography

Archana Madhavan is a translator of Korean literature into English. Her book-length works include Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (co-translation, 2022) and Roadkill by Amil (2025), and her other poetry and prose translations have been published in The Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Columbia Journal, and more. In 2022, she was chosen for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Emerging Translator Mentorship Program to translate Lee Jenny's debut book of poetry Pirowa Padowa. She won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize in 2024. She lives in San Jose, California. Lee Jenny is a poet and writer born in Busan, South Korea in 1972. In 2008, she made her literary debut with the poem "Peru" which won the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer's Award. She has since published four poetry collections: Pirowa Padowa (2010), Because We Don't Know Us (2014), The Things That Were Thus Scribbled (2019), The Sentences That Aren't Even There are Beautiful (2019), and an essay collection Dawn and Music (2024). She was the recipient of the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2016 and the Hyundae Munhak Award in 2022.