There is a saying in Korea: “In the North, we have Kim So-wol; in the South, we have Kim Yeong-nang.” The two stand as twin pillars of the country’s lyric poetry, their work still shaping the emotional landscape of modern Korean verse. Kim Yeong-nang (1903-50) left behind just 86 poems, written over the course of his 47-year life before it was cut short at the dawn of the 1950-53 Korean War. Last month, those writings found new life in the first Korean-English bilingual edition of his complete works. “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever,” translated by the veteran scholar Brother Anthony, places the original Korean poems alongside their English renderings. Read side by side, they invite the reader to experience Kim’s signature musicality as it moves from one language to another. To trace how Brother Anthony first came to translate the poems, one must go back nearly two decades. “Kim Hyeon-cheol, the poet’s son, arrived in my office 20 years ago,” he told The Korea Times. “He had come back to Korea (after a long exile in the United States) hoping to find somebody who wo