introduction
1.
What should I say, it's my birthday
2.
Inefficiency
3.
Flowers blooming on the curb
4.
Breaking a promise
5.
hole in the head
6.
Still recovering
7.
praying mantis
8.
Greetings among black people
9.
High fives from strangers
10.
Handwriting
11.
Transplanting
12.
Nicknames
13.
But, perhaps…
14.
“Ecstasy is a profoundly human madness.”
15.
house party
16.
hummingbird
17 Just a dream
18.
“That feels a bit like Bambi…”
19.
Gratitude, something that cannot be suppressed
20.
Knock knock
21.
Coffee served without a coaster
(syncopation)
102.
my birthday
Acknowledgements
Translator's Note

gaze at joy

Some joys are spontaneous and explosive, while others are hidden in the corners of life.
American poet and essayist Ross Gay argues that the emotion of "joy" is not simply a pleasant emotional response, but rather a sense that must be constantly practiced and trained, fully embracing the fragility and complexity of life.
He started a project to write about one 'joy' every day for a year to celebrate his birthday, and this book was completed based on those records.
In over 100 essays on various types of joy, Ross Gay says:
“I will write down one joy every day for a year.
It will start on my birthday, August 1st, and end on the same day the following year.

The first draft will be written quickly.
To be written by hand.
The rules made my work a discipline and a form of practice for me.
“Spend time every day thinking about and writing about joy.” The joy described in The Book of Joy isn’t just a bright and optimistic moment.
It's closer to an attitude of opening one's sensitive senses and tentacles, and trying to discover something that still shines within the complexity and contradictions of the world without turning away from it.
A nickname given to a friend, a quick conversation at the airport, a high-five with a stranger, the vitality of a plant growing in the garden – Ross Gay tells us that joy doesn't just happen, but is an act of actively discovering, observing, and collecting.
This book shows how an attitude toward discovering joy can transform your life.

Expanding Joy

The Book of Joy is not a record of personal feelings.
Ross Gay says that sharing joy with others is the most active form of resistance we can choose in an age rife with anxiety, hatred, alienation, and violence.
The attitude of thinking about and sharing joy becomes a resolute practice of strengthening affection and solidarity toward one another even in a life filled with oppression, loss, sorrow, and anger.
“A brother addicted to drugs, a murdered mother, a father who died during surgery, someone rejected by his family, cancer that came back, someone who was evicted, an unhealthy fetus.
Everyone, always, lives on despite all this.
“Not to mention the existential sadness that we all suffer from.” He poetically restores the humor, brotherhood, and communal joy found in everyday rituals, especially in the Black community, and shows how this can be a way to confront political oppression.
Joy is not a look away, but a gaze, not an escape, but a confrontation.
The joy he explores borderlessly blends emotions of pain and nostalgia, loss and recovery, and gives us, living in this world today, a powerful force.
“I have written well about how joy and longing, joy and loneliness – or, more precisely, existential loneliness, irreversible loneliness – are connected.
“The two emotions are related.”

Celebrating joy

The Book of Joy is more like a living festival of language than a record of quiet meditation.
Ross Gay's prose is raw and honest, capturing humor, jokes, and the flow of spontaneous thoughts.
He captures the small joys of the day, pushes them into words, twists them freely, and unfolds them leisurely.
Rhythmic sentences, hip-hop and basketball, movies and neighborly jokes - his writing is a unique form of poetic practice, alive with the poet's stamp and contemporary sensibility.
“As these joys gathered and accumulated, I naturally began to recognize a pattern.
“The patterns of joys that move, unfold, walk slowly, stumble, or mutter until I understand them.” These writings go beyond private records and become a public language that enables a social solidarity of emotions.
The Book of Joy reminds us that the sensations we often overlook—walking, looking, talking, laughing, and being absentminded—are the most fundamental forces that make up life.
This book unfolds like a map that provides clues to reviving the senses that have become dulled by fatigue and anxiety and to restoring a broken relationship with the world.

The writings contained herein are over 100 adventures and performances by a graceful writer.
As is often the case with engaging writing, while translating it, I found myself wanting to write something like this.
While translating, I just kept thinking about lists.
The sleeping face of a child who will soon wake up and start babbling, a thick English dictionary bought for 2,000 won at a second-hand store (also used to work on this book), a cactus instead of a wreath at a newly opened taco shop, a lunchbox that I finally put to good use on my way to and from the studio, flowers on the roadside that I always pass by without paying attention, but then I remember the writer's habit and end up looking at.
There is a wonderful response to this unexpected joy in this book.
"We are everywhere." - From the translator's note, Kim Mok-in