Mira Bai was a Hindu mystic and saint in the 16th century. Though born a Rajput princess, she was drawn to the god Krishna since childhood. Mira Bai rejected traditional roles for women after the death of her husband, choosing instead to spend her life worshipping that incarnation of Vishnu…
Episode 12 of the K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo features a powerful poem about putting others first, from author Ahn Do-hyun’s 2004 collection Lonely High Solitary (외롭고 높고 쓸쓸한). I couldn’t get the powerful imagery off my mind: in Korea even today, people fight off the winter cold with charcoal briquettes.…
I’ve been watching the Korean drama 기상청 사람들: 사내연애 잔혹사 편, known in English as Forecasting Love and Weather. In episode six, there’s a lovely scene in which the two leads (who work for the Korea Meteorological Administration and therefore know a lot about the weather) are reading a lovely…
Like many folks around the world, I was introduced to the poetry of Kim Sowol—who published a single book of poems, Azaleas, before dying at age thirty-two—through the show The King: Eternal Monarch. In episode three, the eponymous ruler of alternate Earth Kingdom of Corea pulls Azaleas from a shelf…
One of the many things I love about watching K-drama is all the wonderful poetry I’ve been introduced to. During episode 10 of Hometown Cha Cha Cha, male protagonist Hong Ban-jang reads the poem “The Gatekeeper” from the collection Portrait of Echoes by Kim Haengsook (so that female protagonist Yoon…
Ever since I first watched the Korean drama 쓸쓸하고 찬란하神 – 도깨비, known in English as Guardian: The Great and Lonely God or simply Goblin, I have been obsessed with the poem the male lead (Kim Shin, an immortal goblin) reads from an anthology the female lead (Ji Eun-tak, his…
Karai Senryū was born in 1718 in Edo. A town official and frequent judge of poetry contests, he was responsible for popularizing a more whimsical or humorous variation of haiku that now bears his name (senryū). Some of his work is darkly ironic, as in this piece. her parents, left…
In 1688, during one of his many journeys throughout Japan, Bashō came to Mount Yamato Katsuragi. Near the Shinto shrine for the local god, Hitokotonushi, the poet composed this haiku. still, what joy I’d feel to find the god’s face amid all these morning blooms —translated by David Bowles, April…
Rosario Castellanos was an influential Mexican poet who wrote this piece after the government massacre of students and other protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The poem made its way into Elena Poniatowska’s book on the massacre. The third stanza was…
Information on original text. The manuscript known as the Florentine Codex is a three-volume copy of a Nahuatl-Spanish bilingual work titled Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana library in Florence. The 2400-page ethnography is the result of decades of research conducted by…
