Pirowa Padowa

Overview

From award-winning South Korean poet Lee Jenny, and translated for the first time into English, comes a collection that takes the reader on a journey through a fantastical linguistic landscape exploring the existential yearning and passions of youth through lively wordplay. These fifty-six poems probe universal, yet complex human emotions—from alienation and disappointment to triumph and resolve—whose ever-shifting gradients are difficult to contain within standard language. Instead, Lee sheds conventional grammar and syntax and makes use of repetition, rhythm, alliteration, and other sonic devices to stretch one’s notions of language and introduce infinite possibilities of meaning. Indeed the title of the collection, PIROWA PADOWA, transliterated from the Korean, expands beyond its definition and serves as an onamatopoeia for the ebb and flow of Lee’s poetic language. In these poems, Lee juxtaposes real-world locations like Peru and Africa with imaginary lands like Kariponia, populating them with indefinable creatures that speak in neologisms—in doing so, she asks us to abandon preconceived notions of any specific place or word to arrive at our own interpretations.

Reviews

In PIROWA PADOWA, poet Lee Jenny and translator Archana Madhavan pull readers into a vivid dance of sound, meaning, and sensation. Originally titled [“Maybe Africa”] in Korean, the collection joyfully disrupts linguistic boundaries, capturing the constant motion of thought and feeling through poems that never quite settle, leaving threads of meaning open and alive. Archana Madhavan meets Lee Jenny’s linguistic innovation with equal creativity, translating each playful phrase and delicate rhythm with sensitivity and imagination. In this book, the poet and her translator create something that lives between two languages, a conversation that flows endlessly, resisting final interpretation, softly echoing in the mind of anyone who’s ever lingered in the space between what language can and cannot say. —Jack Saebyok Jung, author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus and co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works

Meet your favorite poet’s new favorite poet. Archana Madhavan’s imaginative translation of Lee Jenny’s PIROWA PADOWA is a cosmic rhapsody where words come alive, undergo metamorphosis, and are made whole again. The result is an exquisite kaleidoscope of poems, dazzling and unpredictable, in which the rhythms of language reflect the sweet chaos of living. —May Huang, translator of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist

Author Biography

Archana Madhavan is a translator of Korean literature into English. Her book-length works include Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (co-translation, 2022) and Roadkill by Amil (2025), and her other poetry and prose translations have been published in The Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Columbia Journal, and more. In 2022, she was chosen for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Emerging Translator Mentorship Program to translate Lee Jenny’s debut book of poetry Pirowa Padowa. She won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize in 2024. She lives in San Jose, California. Lee Jenny is a poet and writer born in Busan, South Korea in 1972. In 2008, she made her literary debut with the poem “Peru” which won the Kyunghyang Daily News New Writer’s Award. She has since published four poetry collections: Pirowa Padowa (2010), Because We Don’t Know Us (2014), The Things That Were Thus Scribbled (2019), The Sentences That Aren’t Even There are Beautiful (2019), and an essay collection Dawn and Music (2024). She was the recipient of the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2016 and the Hyundae Munhak Award in 2022.