The Corporeality of Writing: Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death

Autobiography of Death, the first Korean recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2019, is an extended elegy in fifty poems.¹ The book can also be considered a ceremony for the dead: Each of the first forty-nine poems corresponds to a day in which the spirit of the deceased wanders before entering the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Translated by Kim's longtime collaborator, Korean American poet Don Mee Choi (b. 1962), the book excavates the deaths of Koreans who "lost their lives under the violent force of government," including dissidents during the military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏng-hŭi, 1961–1979) and Chun Doo Hwan (Chŏn Tuhwan, 1979–1988), many of whom were students. Autobiography of Death connects the structural injustice of this loss of life during South Korea's democratization movement with the recent deaths of two hundred fifty high school students who drowned during the Sewol Ferry disaster in 2014 because of the negligence of the Park Geun-hye government (Pak Kŭnhye, 2013–2017).²

Born in 1955 shortly after the Korean War (1950–1953) in Uljin, North Kyŏngsang Province, Kim Hyesoon (Kim Hyesun) is one of the most significant and imaginative poets of her generation. Kim made her literary debut in the influential journal Munhak kwa chisŏng (Literature and intellect) in 1979, the final year of Park Chung Hee's authoritarian regime and the year before the Kwangju Uprising during which two hundred civilians were killed. When Kim and another leading feminist poet, Ch'oe Sŭngja (b. 1952), became the first two women to publish in the journal, they were among the only female poets acknowledged in the predominantly male literary circles of the 1980s.

Kim recalls that literary critics insisted she write poetry that could "communicate and benefit society," while at the same time stating that a "woman poet is nature" who must "evoke something gentle and motherly."³ Kim rejects these criteria of "yŏryu" poetry that male writers expected from women, characteristics celebrated in poets of the 1950s and 1960s such as Hong Yunsuk (1925–2015) and Hŏ Yŏngja (b. 1938).⁴ Male literary demands during the 1980s could be compared, Kim contends, to "a single father who enforced a triple form of oppression on women: a father who oppressed an individual socially and politically, who crushed gender equality, and who mandated that women form their identity from the margins."⁵ Kim relates that even in the twenty-first century, "We are still living in a Confucian culture of the Chosŏn period" regarding the patriarchal expectations of women.⁶ Chŏng Myŏnggyo at Yonsei University has pointed out how her poems exploit and overturn these expectations, as seen in her ironic poem "A Sublime Kitchen," in which gluttonous guests arrive to "eat the moon" to the point where they are "gagged" by food.⁷ The internalized gender oppression Kim experienced is harnessed in her work, which creates new possibilities for the written vernacular through explosive and fragmentary language that documents female experience through a poetry of embodied action.

Throughout her career, Kim has emphasized the corporeality of writing as a woman, an act she considers distinct from the experiences of male writers. In her 2017 essay, "Nanŭn ajik t'aeŏnaji anassŭmŭro" (As I Am Not Yet Born), Kim states,

내 몸으로 시를 쓴다는 것은, '시한다' 는 것은, 내가 내 안에서 내 몸인 여자를 찾아 헤매고, 꺼내놓으려는 지난한 출산 행위와 다름이 없다. 나에겐 신화시대부터 면면히 이어져온 이야기와 시들을 통해 의미를 주던 아버지들로부터 도망쳐 너를 사랑하면 할수록 더욱더 내 몸속에서 나오고 싶어 안달인 여자가 있다. 사랑의 욕망으로 꿈틀거리는 여자와 내 몸이 쌍둥이처럼 맞붙어 다시 태어나려는 몸짓, 그 자가(自家) 출산이 '몸하는' 시다.

To write poetry with my body, to "do poetry," is no different from undergoing an extremely difficult childbirth in which I am trying to search for the bodied woman inside me and bring her forth. I have run away from the fathers who gave me meaning through the ceaselessly, continuously transmitted stories and poems from mythical times, and the more I love you the more eager is the woman who wants to come out from my body. The woman wriggling from love's desire and my body, like twins grappling with each other in a gesture seeking rebirth—that birth from the home of oneself is poetry that "enacts the body."⁸

Writing for Kim is a process of giving birth to a self that has differentiated itself from the prescriptions of men and their ideas of poetry to create an alternate artistic vision. From Kim's perspective, women "do" or "enact" poetry with their bodies as they write. Through her poetry, Kim subverts the gendered expectations of "womanly work" connected to Korean women's identities⁹ in the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) by framing the act of writing as volitional female labor.

In the rite for the dead that she creates in Autobiography of Death, Kim maintains this connection to the body. Like traditional mudang, female shamans, Kim facilitates a radical empathy with which her speakers enter the physical bodies of the dead and invoke their spirits. Some poems imaginatively reconstruct the last moments of the Tanwŏn High School students as they drowned after the captain of the Sewŏl Ferry and crew members abandoned them to escape. In "Asphyxiation: Day Forty-Six," the speaker attempts to breathe while underwater:

Hence breathThen breathNext breathSubsequent breathBecause breathSuch breathAnd breathSame breathThereafter breathThus breathAlways breathEventually breathPerpetually breathYet breathHowever breathTherefore breathIn spite of breathBreath till the bitter end

Death breathes and you dream but

it's time to remove the ventilator from deathit's time to shatter the dream with a hammer¹⁰

Poetic form here heartbreakingly mirrors content: It is breath that eludes the speaker even as she calls out for it in every line. In the end, it is death that breathes, shattering the dream of rescue.

To document the emotional registers of such a disaster, the literary techniques of realism seem insufficient. Just as Abstract Expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) developed a new language in painting that could better represent reality following the horrors of World War II, Kim Hyesoon invented a poetic language to articulate the structural violence and social inequalities of postwar South Korea. She changed the technical standard. Kim's writing has been criticized as difficult, vulgar, and grotesque, particularly as it has disrupted conventions for female poets. In a 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Kim is questioned about this perception and responds: "I'm just writing this reality as it is but people call that grotesque. … Personally I find socalled realist poetry much stranger, as if they held up a mirror only to the outside, to the everyday. I'm just following the traces of what I see."¹¹ Kim often employs abstraction and surrealism to articulate the interiority of her speakers. Here, for example, the desolation of death: "Something like the clear eagle on your back / Something like the clear toenail inside your dark throat / Like the falling frail twilight and / the rising frail dawn / certain light caves in" ("Naked Body: Day Sixteen," 30). Kim also engages lyricism to convey the inevitability of that desolation: "In the corner of Mommy's heart, a small black mole lifts its head / It becomes a song. A fabulous solo roams desperately looking for death" ("Mommy of Death," 44). In creating her innovative poetic language, it seems clear that Kim was not only in dialogue with pathbreaking female contemporaries such as Ch'oe Sŭngja, Yi Yŏnju (1953–1992), and Kim Sŭnghŭi (b. 1952) but that she has also absorbed the work of prominent male poets such as Yi Sang (1910–1937), whose surrealistic poems also seek to give meaningmaking agency to the unconscious, as well as the contemporary poet Kim Chiha (b. 1941), a leader of the minjung democratization movement who gained a wide readership through his demotic and "vulgar" lexicon.

While Kim was celebrated by female writers and feminist organizations such as Another Culture and the Research Center for Korean Women's Studies in the 1990s, widespread critical acclaim for Kim Hyesoon began late that decade, amid a shifting publishing landscape following democratization that reflected rising demand and opportunities for female writers. In 1997, Kim became the first woman to receive the Kim Suyŏng Literature Award, which was soon followed by additional accolades traditionally given to male writers, such as the Sowŏl Poetry Prize in 2000 and the Midang Literature Award in 2006. In contemporary Korea, Kim's influence is visible in the work of younger writers of both poetry and fiction, particularly female writers as varied as Kim Sunwoo (b. 1970), Han Kang (b. 1970), and Han Yujoo (b. 1982). Since the 2000s, Kim's work began reaching an international audience, and she has been enthusiastically received in the Anglophone world. Bruce Fulton, a renowned translator of Korean fiction who has anthologized numerous works by female writers,¹² called her "by far the most imaginative poet in Korea today." Kim's poems were made readily available to English speakers and students of Korean literature when literary scholars David McCann and Peter Lee anthologized them in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry in 2004¹³ and Echoing Song: Contemporary Women Poets in 2005.¹⁴ The following year, a further selection of her work appeared in translation in Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women,¹⁵ her first collaboration with Don Mee Choi.

Choi's excellent English translation of Autobiography of Death preserves the linguistic ingenuity of Kim's poetry while investing the collection with lucidity. This book marks Choi's sixth translation of Kim's work, following the anthology Anxiety of Words (2006) and the single-author collections Fountain of Feathers (2008), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011), Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014, finalist for a PEN Poetry in Translation Award), and I'm OK, I'm Pig! (2014). Born in Seoul and residing in the United States, Choi has published her own collections of poetry, including The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), Petite Manifesto (2014), and Hardly War (2016). Choi's experience as a poet working in English informs her translation of Kim, enabling the translations to breathe as poems on their own terms and contributing to Kim's international recognition in recent years. In Kim's "Anxiety of Words," for example, Choi retains the shape and movement of the poem while making images legible for the receiving culture.

말

2. 말의 긴장

다시 말할 수 있어요? 초, 록, 초, 록 냉장된 내 말이 지하실 윤전기속에서 도는 것, 봐요.

마당에 입 대고 말해요. 네 입 크로바가 사방 연속 무늬로 피어나고 말에는 시간 꽃이 피어요. 파도에 입 대고 말해요. 배들이 항구를 떠나고 갈매기떼 높이 그대 말이 뛰어오를 거예요.

냉동된 우리의 말에 주사 놓지 말아요. 주사 맞은 말들이 어디로가는가 숨어서 보지 말아요.

―문득 벨 소리――대포 소리―

―모두 아, 하고 입벌려―

Words

2. Anxiety of Words

Can you speak again? See how my green, green frozen words spin inside a basement cylinder press.

Talk with your mouth to the ground. Four-leaf clovers grow in successive patterns and time-flowers bloom as words. Talk with your mouth to the waves. Boats leave port and your words leap and rise as high as the gulls.

Don't give needles to our frozen words. Don't hide andwatch where the words go after they get their shots.

Suddenly a bell sounds—Cannons roar—

Everyone say Ahh, open your mouths!¹⁶

The abstract plural noun in Korean, "sigan kkot," is skillfully rendered as "time-flowers." Choi chooses to forego the hyphens at the beginning of the last three lines yet preserves them at the end of the lines, which lends a greater urgency to them and heightens the speaker's state of anxiety. In this ecofeminist poem, Kim aligns the oppression of women with the state of the nonhuman world. Choi's translation illuminates the way in which the speaker's mouth and body are contiguous with the land and actively in dialogic relationship. While the speaker's words might have simply been extinguished as they were buried in the ground, in this exchange, the ground responds as the speaker's words become a catalyst for changes in the land and waves.

Choi's translations could be considered to be what Walter Benjamin called "transparent," allowing the English to shed light on the original language.¹⁷ As a translator working from Korean to English, however, Choi is aware of the asymmetrical power dynamic between Korea and America, and the paratextual additions to her translations ensure that she remains visible as a mediator of Kim's work.¹⁸ Autobiography of Death concludes with a lengthy interview between Choi and Kim, followed by Kim's "Translator's Note."¹⁹ With these questions and texts, Choi frames the book as a meditation on Korea's violent democratization movement and an "autotestimony," explicating Kim's writing process as one that cost her great physical and mental suffering in revisiting the historical traumas she lived through.²⁰ Choi underscores Kim's view of the "structure of death, that we remain living in," interpreting that structure as incorporating the "neocolonial and neoliberal order that has shaped Korea's history since the U.S. intervention at the end of World War II."²¹ Expanding the implications of Kim's responses, Choi suggests that the narration of this "structure of death" is a method of decolonization.

On the technical level, minor translation flaws can be found in a few places, such as in "Winter's Smile: Day 19." For a poem that explores human sentience after death, it would seem important to relay all details concerning sense perceptions. The speaker describes what it is like to have "come out from a warm body": "Icy, like soil dug out from a flower pot / Sunny, like the sunlight fish stare at beneath the sheet of ice / Hot, like when lips touch a frozen door knob."²² In Korean, this last line describes the doorknob as not only frozen but also made of cast iron: "무쇠 문고리," "cast iron doorknob." The specificity of the cast iron material heightens the reader's awareness of how cold the frozen doorknob must be when lips are placed on it: cold enough to burn.

The conferral of the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2019 to Kim's Autobiography of Death indicates that more works of Korean literature are circulating beyond the country and becoming world literature.²³ Choi's translation is among a growing number of adept translations of Korean fiction and poetry that have facilitated international attention and interest in Korean authors. It is notable that in the past decade, this attention has focused on female South Korean writers, including Shin Kyungsook (b. 1963), who won the Man Asian Literary Prize for Ŏmma rŭl put'akhae (Please Look After Mom, trans. Kim Chi-young) in 2012,²⁴ and Han Kang, who was the first Korean author to be awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2016 for Ch'aesikchuuija (The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith).²⁵ In her poem, "Remembering the Day I Gave Birth to a Daughter" (1985), Kim Hyesoon's speaker enters mirror after mirror, discovering generations of women who have come before her: "Opening the mirror, I enter / and my mother sits inside the mirror / opening the mirror again, I re-enter / and my mother's mother sits inside the mirror."²⁶ Writing poems that "enact the body," that give rise to literary experimentation beyond male expectations, Kim has long envisioned a future of women writers who will be able to absorb her voice as they create their own.