한국하이쿠연맹 홈페이지 가입 안내

Reading Korea Haiku through Metaphorical Transformation and the Transmutation of the Senses— The Moment the World Changes at “the Threshold of a Single Line”Cultural Critic Kim Soo-sungIn literature, metaphor is not a mere ornament. It is not a rhetorical device used simply to decorate the world beautifully, but a mechanism that changes the direction of our perception. When we do not call an object by what it is, but transfer it into “something else,” meaning is not merely replaced. The very order of sensation surrounding that object is rearranged. This rearrangement of sensation is what may be called literary transformation, and Korea Haiku is a poetic form that carries out this transformation in the briefest possible breath.Today’s literary environment is fast, fragmented, and simultaneous. Within the rhythm of digital platforms, texts circulate in real time, while emotions are amplified into collective affect through comments and sharing. Under such conditions, it is hasty to judge short literary forms as shallow. On the contrary, short forms increase the density of sensation by reducing language, and they allow readers to feel the world anew by removing excessive explanation. Brevity is not poverty; it is compression. And compression becomes another path toward depth. The key devices that open this path are metaphorical transformation and the transmutation of the senses.When we speak of transformation, the first image that comes to mind is a threshold through which one scene passes into another. Literature has long shaped that threshold through the image of the seasons. Winter, in particular, has been read in East Asian literature as a season of quiet grief, inwardness, stillness, and waiting. Yet winter should not be understood merely as a metaphor of extinction. Winter is not a time when everything stops, but a time when meaning condenses invisibly and prepares for the next becoming. The stillness of winter is not emptiness. It is a space in which meaning may be rearranged. It is not an end, but a threshold.At this point, winter can be read as a time of transition. From the perspective of liminality, a concept discussed by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, winter is a boundary-time in which the old order has dissolved, while the new order has not yet fully taken shape. In this boundary, human beings temporarily step outside the familiar order of everyday life, and literature experiments with a new rhythm of sensation within that interval. When Korea Haiku deals with winter, what matters is not explaining winter. Rather than offering a long commentary on its meaning, Korea Haiku quietly places before us a single sign left by winter.Haiku-like thinking does not speak at length about causes. Instead, it shows the delicate surface of results. It does not directly name emotion, but arranges objects and landscapes into which emotion may seep. A wet glove, a cooling teacup, a footprint paused before a door—such imag…