2024-12-03

Autobiography of Death : Hyesoon, Kim, Choi, Don Mee: Amazon.com.au: Books

Autobiography of Death : Hyesoon, Kim, Choi, Don Mee: Amazon.com.au: Books

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Autobiography of Death Paperback – Illustrated, 7 December 2018
by Kim Hyesoon (Author), Don Mee Choi (Translator)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award*

The title section of Kim Hyesoon's powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea's violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls "the structure of death, that we remain living in." Autobiography of Death, Kim's most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death-how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural "you" speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with "Face of Rhythm," a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

128 pages
7 December 2018

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"By being 'of' and not 'about' death, Autobiography of Death recognizes both individual and collective involvement in the structure of death--unable to unstick itself from the structure of power."--Lotte L.S. "Ploughshare" (12/19/2018 12:00:00 AM)

In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death's cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers.--Madeline Vardell "The Arkansas International" (12/10/2018 12:00:00 AM)

In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems--one for each day the dead must await reincarnation--to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi's extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Hyesoon's art--a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism--yield 'a low note no one has ever sung before.' That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, 'for even death can't enter this deep inside me.'--Griffin Prize Judges Citation (4/24/2019 12:00:00 AM)

Living through the military dictatorships and uprisings of South Korea's post-war period, and writing from a present marked by continued corruption among society's highest ranks, Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death addresses and gives voice to the swirling and incalculable mass of those whose lives were ended unjustly.--Tyler Green "Kenyon Review"

Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim...This is Choi's sixth masterly translation of Kim, and it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred)" (10/15/2018 12:00:00 AM)

The birdlike Kim wove a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before.--Sasha Dugdale (10/15/2018 12:00:00 AM)

Kim Hyesoon is Korea's most important living poet and by far its most imaginative writer.--Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature, University of British Columbia
About the Author
Kim Hyesoon is the author of several books of poetry and essays. She has received many awards for her poetry, including the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize for Autobiography of Death and the prestigious Samsung Ho-Am Prize in 2022.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ *New Directions; 1st edition (7 December 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811227340
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811227346
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.49 x 1.02 x 23.11 cmBest Sellers Rank: 722,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)621 in History & Criticism of Asian Literature
732 in Asian Poetry (Books)
2,331 in Poetry by WomenCustomer Reviews:
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

===

Autobiography of Death

Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi (Translator)

The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,” a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

GenresPoetryAsiaDeathAsian LiteratureFictionWomens21st Century
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110 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2016
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About the author

Kim Hyesoon26 books61 followers

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Born in Ulijin, South Korea, Kim Hyesoon (1955-) received her PhD in Korean Literature from Konkuk University, and began as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette. She began to receive critical acclaim in the late 1990s and she attributes this to the strong wave of interest in poetry by woman poets; currently she is one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets, and she now lives and teaches in Seoul. Her poetry aims to strive for a freedom from form, by experimenting with language focusing on the sensual - often female - body, in direct opposition to male-dominated lyrical poetry. ‘They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women.’

Having published more than ten poetry collections, a number of these have been translated into English recently: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005); Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) and I’m O.K., I’m Pig (2014). Tinfish has also published a small chapbook of three essays entitled Princess Abandoned (2012).

Throughout her career she has gained nearly all of South Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, named after the country’s greatest poets, such as Kim Su-yông Literature Award (1997), the Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and the Midang Literature Award (2006). She was also the first female to win the Daesan Literary Award in 2008.

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Displaying 1 - 10 of 94 reviews

Sleepless Dreamer

881 reviews346 followers

March 16, 2023

A man reached out and groped me yesterday.

I found an alley to walk through on my way to my classes. Seoul's alleyways are so cute and when I saw the same man twice this week in that alley, I actually thought that it is great to see a familiar face, to feel a sense of community. I was considering telling him good morning.

Maybe this is the most infuriating part. I was thinking about feeling welcome in my new neighborhood, thinking about kindness. He was not even seeing me as a person. He had some boxes in the alley and he moved them for me to pass. I smiled in thanks and then, as I passed, felt his hand squeezing me.

I've never frozen like that before.

It took me a few seconds to realize that this is happening, there is a strange man's hand on my body, his hand is on me. He was grinning.

A million thoughts were running through my head. I don't know the Korean for "get your hand off me, you fucking creep". I don't know if it's acceptable to shove an older man in Korea. No one is here, is it wise to get into a fight over this? How can I express that I'm not okay with this? Why is he smiling like that?

And I was so shocked. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I've heard other people describe that this can happen but this was the first time I could understand how people freeze in those moments. Everything and nothing was going through my mind, I was not fully there.

I'm not even sure how long this lasted, it felt like 5 years. It could have been 7 seconds.

When I backed away from him, he kept smiling at me, this stupid shit eating grin, one that says he knows exactly that what he did was wrong and doesn't care whatsoever. I left without saying a word.

I have been jumpy since. I keep feeling his hands on me. I have never felt this helpless. I have never felt this violated. My body did not belong to me in those moments and I feel as though something has been stolen from me, something has died, as if my control over my body was only ever temporary.

I've been reading statistics and psychology articles and feminist blogs, somehow looking for a way to make this feel normal, to make myself feel like this isn't something that will shape me. I keep trying to tell myself that it was just a hand on my body, that it was only a few seconds, that it's not that big of a deal really. Just a hand.

I started reading Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide because I want to know about Korean feminism. I want to understand the social perception of women here. While I'm still reading it, I also wanted to read some Korean poetry, to feel a little less alone. So I found this book.

Kim absolutely delivers. This book is phenomenal. 49 poems about death and love and religion and feminism and regrowth and pain. 49 poems, each one beautiful. Together, they make such a powerful whole. I loved reading this. It resonated so deeply. I sunk into her words and they transformed me.

I loved the depictions of dolls, of disasters, of children. Kim weaves in the Korean dictatorship with this prose that's always aimed at the reader, at us, childlike words connected to prayers and policy. So much despair, so much grief, so much power. I know I'll reread this body of work again.

I find Korea fascinating. I like Korea. I want to love Korea even more. Walking through that alley again will demand bravery but I'll do it. This city belongs to me, too. Korea might not be as feminist as it can be but women and femme presenting people deserve to feel safe in the street and I won't let this control me, I won't let it close Seoul's alleys for me. I won't let this take away my sense of freedom and power. As Kim illustrates, death is also life.

And if I see this man again, I've done my homework:

내게서 손 치워, 이 망할 소름끼치는 놈아

Laura

Author 2 books28 followers

August 8, 2020

For day #6 of the Sealey Challenge, I read AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEATH by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. In an interview between the poet and the translator, Hyesoon reveals that she wrote these poems after the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, which killed over 300 people, many of them high school students on a field trip. There’s a poem for each of the 49 days that the spirit is said to remain in limbo after death, before rebirth/reincarnation.

This is a harrowing book. Reading it in one sitting, I feel so many things. Awe. Horror. Heartbreak. Fully immersed in the realization that “(I’m being shoved out of the only body I have in the world)” – slowly, perhaps (for now), but inexorably.

Sometimes, it all felt like too much to bear, and I found myself asking, along with the speaker from Day Thirty-Three, “What can I do to forget all this?” But the poet doesn’t let up, and of course, the dead get no break from being dead, just as the bereaved cannot control grief’s timeline. So I rallied, and was repeatedly rewarded by powerful, disturbing imagery, and inventive language.

“Someone dead sits at the desk and crinkles paper

A cold winter night for the people of the North Pole
They gnaw on birds that have been buried in the ground wrapped in bearskin
the red birds that smell like their own heads” (“Smell,” p. 37)

“The spectacle of roaming after death as a faint adverb!” (p. 40)

“(I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)” (p. 62)

The book includes the aforementioned interview, and a translator’s note (more like an essay), both of which are illuminating, and I appreciate their placement at the end of the text, so that one can read the book with lesser mediation, if one wishes. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderfully strange drawings by Fi Jae Lee that appear throughout the book.

You can read some poems from the book here:
http://modernpoetryintranslation.com/...

poetry

Vicky

513 reviews

December 26, 2018

Prior to reading this book of poems, I had never heard of the 2014 ferry that capsized in South Korea and drowned 250 high school students on a field trip, in which the crew told the students who were already wearing life jackets to stay inside their cabins while they escaped themselves. This ferry had been carrying 1,228 tons over the legal limit with 410 tons of iron being transported to a new naval base on Jeju Island (deregulation/privatization). But Autobiography of Death is also about many other deaths under the country's dictatorships with which I had no familiarity. It really helped to read the translator's note at the end part-way through the poems, and I would recommend reading the interview with Kim Hyesoon first, too. I need to just re-read this whole book over, to revisit. Incredible, and so dark. . .

death favorites poetry

Radwa

Author 1 book2,248 followers

July 16, 2021

English Review Below

مجموعة شعرية مقسمة إلى 49 قصيدة تعبر عن الـ49 يوما التي تقضيها الروح ما بين الموت وإعادة البعث وفي النهاية قصيدة طويلة شخصية عن الألم، بمجموع 50 قصيدة في الكتاب تركز على الموت، الألم المعنوي والجسدي، الهجران والوحدة.
كل قصيدة ترويها روح أو شبح شخص كوري ميت، وقد قالت الكاتبة إنها تأثرت بحدثين رئيسيين في تاريخ كوريا الجنوبية وهما: مظاهرة "غوانغجو" الطلابية وحادث عبارة 2014 التي مات على إثرها أكثر من 300 شخص أغلبهم طلاب ثانوي.
ظننت مخطئة أن كل القصائد ستركز على الحدثين هذين بكثرة، لكن يبدو أنها تناقش الموت غير العادل بمختلف أشكاله وظروفه ومنهما هذين الحادثين، فنرى موت امرأة وأفكارها بعد الموت في مترو الأنفاق وغيرها.
أسلوب الكتابة الشعري نفسه ليس مفضلا عندي لكن لقيت بعض التشبيهات والمقاطع القوية جدا واللي أثرت فيا. وبصراحة بعتبر الحوار في آخر الكتاب بين الشاعرة والمترجمة أفضل جزء في الكتاب. وأعتقد أني حابة أقرأ ليها كمان، لأن عجبتني أفكارها السياسية والنسوية وقضاياها اللي بتعبر عنها حتى لو كان شعرها مش المفضل عندي.

A collection of poems split into 49 poems for the 49 days that the spirit roams in limbo between death and rebirth or reincarnation, and a long personal poem about pain in the end, with a total of 50 poems focusing on death, emotional and physical pain, abandonment, and loneliness.

Each poem is told by the spirit of a dead Korean, and the author said that she was affected by two main events in South Korea's history which are: Gwangju's uprising and the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, which killed over 300 people, most of them high school students.

I thought all of the poems would focus on these two events, but it seems that it just discusses death, as we see a poem from the point of view of a woman who died on the subway and others. The poetry style itself wasn't my cup of tea, but there were still some parts with strong imaging that hit me hard. Also the interview between her and the translator at the end was the best part of the book.
I'm actually excited to read more from here, because even though her style might not be really for me, I love what she discusses.

2020-awards adult dark-and-gothic

Joseph Schreiber

528 reviews149 followers

January 21, 2019

This engrossing collection of poems giving voice to death resonates with sorrow, anger and despair. Inspired by some of the tragic and violent incidents in recent Korean history, as well as other experiences with death that poet Kim Hyesoon has known, this collection is strange, sometimes grotesque, but at some point there is likely to be an image or a poem that speaks to your own encounters with tragedy and death.
Longer review here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/01/21/fo...

John

419 reviews43 followers

February 22, 2019

49 poems (plus an additional long one) for the 49 days the spirit roams between death and reincarnation. Each poem is “spoken” from the spirit of a dead person, all Koreans in this case. On the one hand it feels shamanistic and specific to the violent history of oppression in Korea. At the same time it’s completely resonant with anyone’s contemporary experience of both life and death within the ongoing oppressions worldwide. This will be read again.

Dexter

345 reviews4 followers

June 25, 2020

I always thought poetry was bullshit. Like, I don’t mean to be crass, but I thought it was elitist shite, so I just avoided it as much as I could.

For some odd reason, I picked up this book. Don’t even remember how I ran into it. It’s a collection of 49 poems + a longer story-like poem, all about death. Feelings of hopelessness, regret, and longing run through them, and it changed my view on poetry.

There are like 10 poems that I really loved, where it’s difficult for my brain to comprehend what it’s saying. So I read it over. And over and over. Each time, I feel like I can understand and visualize the poem a bit better. My favorite one called “Tibet”, I must have read like 50 times.

I can’t recommend this book to anyone, as, well a book on death is a hard recommend. But maybe you’ll be like me at a certain point in life where you’ll appreciate what this author’s view are on death.

In poem form.
Translated from Korean.
Sounds impossible.

Dessa Mae

394 reviews82 followers

July 25, 2020

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

This book offered a unique perspective on death and gave a glimpse of Korea's violent contemporary history. And while the poems were rooted in Korea's history, the unjust arrests and killings under a corrupt government are painfully familiar.

I admit some of the lines/stanzas/poems didn't make sense to me, but the overall picture painted a clear story about tragedy, suffering, pain, and loss. The poems were lush and vivid, and even though I wasn't able to catch all the meanings and symbolism behind the words, they greatly appealed to all of my senses, which I found mesmerizing.

200 reviews75 followers

May 3, 2021

idk how to rate this but for now we’ll leave it blank BFKDLS i really wanted to love this :( i’m sad i didn’t but i’ll be reading more books by kim hyesoon.. this one just felt very repetitive but i did like the interview part