Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms by the famed South Korean poet, Lee Seong-bok, taken from his lectures on poetry and collected by his university students.

This is a small book – each aphorism is presented as though it were its own short piece of work, numbered and ordered; you can generally tell when subsequent sayings are from the same lecture as the overall subject is passed along.

This isn’t the sort of book to read from cover to cover; I can say from having read it that way (in order to be able to review it in good time) that it will surely work best as something you dip in and out of whenever you need inspiration or the book just takes your fancy. The problem with reading it as I did is that you notice perhaps a little too much the repetitions throughout and given that these repetitions are almost certainly simply down to the poet having lectured for 30 years, as per the publicity materials, this is something you’ll want to avoid.

There is an interesting aesthetic value to this book – it could easily have been produced as a big-production coffee table book and provided a lot of visual pleasure to other poets and poetry lovers, but then it may have lost the simplicity of what Seong-bok says. Certainly he has a very literary, metaphorical, and simile-full way of speaking (or writing, if the students took the aphorisms from his notes rather than their own) but he also studies those devices in his advice and speaks out against them in particular ways and for particular reasons. Some of the things said may create a pause – they can be odd, very much out of left field (a dog menstruating making one think of humans, for example) and there’s quite the random focus on the relation between sex and poetry as so on on other subjects – but the majority are good.

My personal favourite is the one included in the promotional material, number 151. I expect it’s the favourite of many:

Don’t get distracted by what fascinates, question the obvious instead. Write about things you’d never even bothered considering the importance of. The question itself is the answer. There is no meaning that exists, only the process in which we make meaning.

The only thing I feel is missing is an introduction, by one of the students, the translator, whoever – there is a very brief note about how the book came to be (largely what I’ve described in my opening) but nothing else beyond that. Some added context about what exactly the lectures were about, where they were given, and how the students collected the notes would have been lovely and would have set the book off.

On this, however, I found an Instagram post from the translator, Anton Hur (who has done a wonderful job), which is insightful:

This book was an incredible labor of love from start to finish. Years ago, I found it in a bookstore and fell in love with it. But it was technically non-fiction, and Korean non-fiction was not getting translated so much (at all?) at the time. I made a sample, just for myself, put it in a drawer, and forgot about it.

Then came 2020 when I got to attend [The British Centre for Literary Translation’s] multilingual prose workshop […] I was trying to illustrate a point and showed the workshop my sample. They were WOWED. They asked me if there were more of these aphorisms! That’s when I knew this book could work in translation.

I thought maybe 200 people would buy the book. But then right before publication, RM of BTS uploaded some of Lee Seong-bok’s aphorisms¹.

Suffice to say this provides a reason for there not being an introduction by the original compilers. There is also the following from the publicity materials:

Students of his class spent a decade gathering Lee’s most inspired, fruitful and provocative insights, which were published as a book of aphorisms in 2015 called Indeterminate Inflorescence.

Over all, then, Indeterminate Inflorescence makes for a lovely keepsake that will round off a poetry lover’s library with an aid or inspiration for when time is short. It’s the kind of book you can buy and enjoy over and over again, gaining new insights every time. There are so many aphorisms included – 470 – that you’re bound to find some that resonate with you and that on a very high level.

I was sent this book for review.

Publisher: Allen Lane (Penguin)
Pages: 162
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-241-72815-4
First Published: 2015; 12th September 2023 in English
Date Reviewed: 13th November 2024

Original language: Korean
Original title: 무한화서 (Indeterminate Inflorescence)
Translated by: Anton Hur

Footnotes

¹ Anton Hur, 15th December 2023, Instagram