Autobiography of Death
Published on 3. June 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
978-1-916751-28-6 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
'I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.'
The title section of Kim Hyesoon's visceral 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 at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death - how we die 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.
'I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.'
The title section of Kim Hyesoon's visceral 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 at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death - how we die 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.
Reviews / Votes
'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 '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 '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.' The Kenyon Review '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., Ploughshares '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.' The Arkansas International 'The limits of creativity here are so wide that very quickly we find we've fallen through the holes old wars blew open, into something like the endless dreams of millions dead.' Blake Butler, Vice 'Kim is a singular poet in Korea, just as she is in America, but we can only fully appreciate this when we see that, for her, violence is not the end but a means.' BookforumMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
High Wycombe
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 174 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
122 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-916751-28-6 (9781916751286)
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Kim Hyesoon has won major acclaim in Korea and internationally and, in Don Mee Choi's English translation, has won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Kim's poetry has been translated into many languages. Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi's poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon's poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.