In Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, a woman loses her speech but continues her studies of Ancient Greek, remaining silent when the class repeats back to the teacher their lessons. One day she writes fragmentary sentences in her notebook, following an example from the lesson, “a woman lies on the ground.” Her fragments read: “Snow in throat” / “Earth in eyes.”1 Another student, peering over her shoulder, curious, points out “laughingly . . . that the woman had written poetry in Greek.”2 In response, she “doesn’t get flustered, doesn’t hastily shut the notebook. She musters all her strength and looks at the young man’s eyes as though into depths of ice.”3
The student is not wrong. The woman is a poet, and the lines prompted by the grammar exercise read as poetic language, surfaced as a kind of automatic writing or symptom of the woman’s obstructed...
