윤동주 별 헤는 밤 영어로 - A Night for Counting Stars, Yun Dong-ju

A Night for Counting Stars

 

by Yun Dong-ju

 

Autumn is full of the sky,

as the season passes.

It seems that I can count all the stars in sky,

in autumn, without any worries.

 

Why I can't count all the faint stars in my heart,

Because morning comes easily,

Because tomorrow night is only left,

It is because my youth is not yet over, truly.

 

Memory for one star,

Love for another star,

Loneliness for another star,

Longing for another star,

Poetry for another star,

My mother, mother for another star.

 

Mother, I call a beautiful name for each star.

 

The names of my friends,

who I shared the same desks,

when I was in elementary school;

I call.

 

Such as Pae, Gyeong, and Ok; the names

of foreign girls,

The names of girls 

who are already mothers,

The names of poor neighbors,

The names of pigeons, dogs, rabbits,

roe deer, and mules,

Francis Jammes, Rainer Maria Rilke; the names

of these poets.

 

As the stars are far away,

they are too far away.

 

Mother, you are far away,

in Northern Gando away.

 

So I, something, missed,

I wrote my name on the hill

and covered my name with dirt,

where many starlights fell.

 

All night long,

the grass bugs sing.

It's probably because

they are ashamed of their names.

 

But when spring comes to my star,

after winter passes,

on the hills where a letter

of my name were buried in lands.

 

Like green grass bloom on the grave,

they will grow lush like pride.

 

Korean Version: gongumadang

 

translated by nous-temperature

 

 

When I was in the second year of middle school, I first came to know this poem. It's one of the few poems I've been memorizing since then. In the deepening autumn, sometimes I want to count the stars by looking at the sky, but it's not easy to see stars in these days. So I looked at the sky and counted the stars in my heart. Falling deeper, thinking of past memories...