Book record
Autobiography of Death
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi
Autobiography of Death, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, is one of those titles that seems impossible and then becomes completely exact. Death, here, is not only an ending; it is a speaker, a method, a system of looking back at the living. Kim’s Korean poetry is famous for its bodily extremity and political imagination, but the force of this book is also its strange discipline. I would read it as a sequence of aftermaths, where grief refuses to become dignified and the dead do not stay politely elsewhere. Choi’s translation keeps the poems jagged, intimate, and unnerving. This is a book for readers who want poetry to make metaphysical pressure feel physical, almost anatomical, without surrendering its dark humor or lyric charge.
- Published
- 2018
- Publisher
- New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- Korea, Republic of
- ISBN
- 9780811227346