Ever so often I come back to this poem by E. J. Koh, but I don’t post it here because it needs to be formatted just right. Here are some quotes: “The word names the feeling that arises as you are buried alive with your dead husband.” “To have han is to be a child who hoped to be loved in a manner she understood but accepts any love, because pain cannot lessen a hope for love.”
I can’t get over the way she uses the word “arises”.
Han leads to illness called Hwa-Byung. It is an “illness that includes symptoms of insomnia, depression, and somatization in the lower abdomen. This illness is unique in that it is found mostly, but certainly not only, in middle-aged Korean females. “
It’s important not to read too many of Koh’s poems at once. She is less dramatic than Goralik, but her poems shatter one’s peace just as much, and the lack of drama means there’s no warning.
TIL that in English puttee comes from the Hindi paṭṭī meaning bandage or long strip of cloth. Портянка, of course, comes from ” пъртъ” meaning “a strip of cloth”. Want to bet there’s the same proto-Indo-European word hiding in there somewhere for both?
Despite the fact that they look exactly the same, puttees are worn differently than портянки, and are more properly translated as онучи or обмотки.
TIL that English does have the word сизый and it’s glaucous (Google translate thinks it’s gray. Google translate is wrong.) There is no practical use for this.
TIL that English does have a word for intelligentsia invented by Coleridge in 1830. He got it from from Klerisei, a German word for clergy, but specifically meant this class of people to be a secular one.
TIL that цокотуха is an actual word in Ukrainian. As in Shevchenko, “Бодай же вас, цокотухи, та злидні побили”. From the text it means something like “prattlers”.
