Autobiography of Death

by 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.

Genres: Poetry, Asia, Death, Fiction, 21st Century, Ebooks, Asian Literature

110 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 2016

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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/...

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. . .

[Radwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[ola ✶ cosmicreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 bardzo osobliwe, dziwne, ale nie dało się oderwać. mam wrażenie, że nie zrozumiałam wszystkiego, ale to, co udało się wyciągnąć było satysfakcjonujące.

[Kamila Kunda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read “Autobiografia śmierci” (“Autobiography of Death”), the collection of 49 poems (plus one long extra) by Kim Hyesoon in Polish, mesmerised by the raw beauty of phrases and images they evoke. According to the Buddhist belief, bardo is the state in which awareness lingers between death and rebirth for 49 days before being reincarnated into another being. Kim devoted her poems to the contemplation of death.

The starting point was the Sewol Ferry tragedy in 2014, the sinking of a ferry headed to the Jeju island, in which 304 people, among whom 250 high school students, died. Surrounded by death, Kim embarked on a journey meditating over the structure and nature of death and that state of bardo. In each poem the author explores pain, suffering, loneliness, but also sounds, textures, images, smells that constitute the structure of life and death. These are very difficult poems in terms of comprehension of all the symbolism, references to Korean history and treatment of women. They render profound traumas of Korean society as a whole.

Kim is a deeply feminist poem and reflects in her whole work on the nature of being a woman in South Korea. Her use of language is incredibly novel and I wish I was able to read her poems in Korean, cherishing the repetitive and incantatory verses, akin to Buddhist sutras - the quality impossible to replicate in translation.

This collection isn’t one to read quickly and put away on the shelf. It’s one to return to, over and over again, as in a trance, and embrace the complexity of the language as well as of human existence. Absolutely exquisite. Surreal and slightly futuristic illustrations by Fi Jae Lee adorn the pages of the book.

[Dexter · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[r · Rating 2 out of 5]

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

[Sita · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite poem in this collection starts with: "Yourfatherinheaven. Belovedbullshitfather."

[hamda · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the violence of being a woman; the chaotic noise of being alive; and the gore of human body, Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon is a meditation on dying of a person and community, intermixed in such a way that it's violent to take them apart. The 49 poems in this collective leaves a taste of zinc on your tongue, forcing you to bite down your flesh, and reflect on your own earthly and vulgar existence.

[Eda Naz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Tiffany for bequesting me this! There were so many incredible lines and poems in this collection, but I'll leave you with a few phrases I kept coming back to from "By The River Formalin" :

"Brain inside the test tube is still alive Looks like it's writing poetry... Brain inside the test tube is hurting... Brain inside the test tube has gone mad"

[Halla Þórðardóttir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m obsessed

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll spend my whole life thinking about this book.
‘There’s something still alive inside the garbage bag left outside behind the restaurant’

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd seen Hyesoon's name in a twitter thread of writers in translation and she stuck in my head enough that hers was the first name I looked for in the poetry section at Prairie Lights. I was so pleased to find her!

Of course, I had no context or real knowledge of Hyesoon going in (nor much experience with translated poetry in general), and I spent a lot of this book worrying about how much I was missing by not knowing much Korean history or culture, and definitely nothing about Korean beliefs about spirits and reincarnation (a focus of much of this collection). Slowly I let go of that and tried to meet these poems where I was -- then I started to find my way into them.

Particularly my two favorites -- "By the River of Formalin" with its scientific imagery -- its brain inside a test tube separated from the rest of the body and yet dreaming the body, dreaming pain; and "Lord No" with is dizzying and effective use of repetition -- "Lord No who is not Lord No is never Lord No thus Lord No is Lord No of Lord No..."

Then, after the forty-nine poems of the death cycle comes a much longer poem rooted in a health crisis that left Hyesoon hospitalized for some time as doctors struggled to identify what was wrong with her and manage her pain. I think it would be very relatable to those who have struggled with chronic or difficult to diagnose illnesses.

These poems range all over from angry to sad to clinical, touch on the body's relation to mind and soul, a body's relation to other bodies, the ways life and death give each other meaning. I am sure that there are cultural aspects I missed in this work, but I greatly appreciated the translator's notes/interview with the author at the end. A great introduction! I hope to read more!

[Sookie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reconnected with an old friend purely by accident, at a bookstore no less. Its been two decades of silence between us yet I was gently pushed to read this book as it was placed in my hands - "lending this to you for only for couple of days". So here I am.

Autobiography of death is a raw exposé of death, as experienced by a collective "you" - people across generations, across the country and various times. Kim Hyesoon's writing is haunting, tragic and raw. Every poem is born out of a tragedy, sometimes lost in history, many times a mere number on a spreadsheet. These people have existed and will continue to exist, and the words in these poems echoes fatality, futile nature of future and the sheer randomness of existence.

Some of my favorite lines below -

day 13
Your heart dies like pebbles by the riverbank
Your heart dies like the sandy shore
Your breathing stops like the dark moon
Behind you, the days that couldn’t become you sob and break like waves

day 19
Cold again, as if zero is divided by zero
a glass divided by glass

day 26
What’s the point of flying when the sky is the inside of a grave?

day 28
You are already born inside death
(echoes 49 times)

day 30 - A gift - (my favorite in this collection)
The most difficult thing for you to part from is your death
In the end, the thing that you must return to yourself is, your death

day 49
Don’t miss you just because you’re not you and I’m the one who’s really you
Don’t miss you as you write and write for forty-nine days with an inkless pen

[Carolyn DeCarlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for the Profound Experience of Poetry book club. I had to read it quickly, as it only just arrived to me on Saturday afternoon with the book club meeting at 8 am on Monday morning. I imagined it wouldn't take long because I made it quite quickly through the first 25 poems, but then I hit a standstill. I went to the zoom meeting anyway. Many spoke about the transformative power the Q & A between Kim and the translator, Don Mee Choi, had on their reading of the poems. Having read it now, I would agree. As I read, I thought to compare Kim's poems to both Zachary Schomburg and Aase Berg, two of my favourite poets. Now that I've also read the interview, I would say Kim's poems had a political intent that leaks more directly onto the page than anything I've read of Zachary's. Her use of language is playful, and I imagine is not an easy element of poetry to express in translation. In the end, reading this book took all day. It sucked the life from me, and I finished it right around midnight. I have been very tired, but I don't know when I've last felt this exhausted, particularly by a book. Read with care, and with caution.

[Ariel Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird and incredible.

[Leia Penina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kills me every time. Immense love for Kim Hyesoon.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important and political book of poetry. This is from the epilogue by the translator Don Mee Choi, first quoting from Kim Hyesoon’s poetry:
It’s midnight and you’re bored./You can’t fall asleep./You go out on the deck./The vast sky and ocean are a black mirror. It wavers. / You think about the sleeping/ fish inside the black mirror./You think about the gluttony/ of the vast mirror that/ leaves nothing behind,/not even a single shadow./ You ponder, What if starting/tomorrow the days without/sunrise continue?/Then we’d be inside this black/mirror 24 hours a day, and/who’d dip a pen into the/mirror water to write about us?/Why is there so much ink for writing?
“I believe Autobiography of Death is one of Kim’s most important and compelling works to date. It not only gives voice to those unjustly killed during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but it also unveils what Kim refers to as “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” An aspect of this structure is the neocolonial and neoliberal order that has shaped Korea’s history since the US intervention at the end of World War II.”

How can it be forgotten that during the Korean War that went from 1950 to 1953 four million Four Million people were killed. And 250,000 pounds of napalm were dropped daily!!! We must not forget and the wars continue. A great book.

[Maddie Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautifully grotesque commentary on the unjust deaths that occur in south korea, including those who passed in the sewol ferry incident and the gwangju uprisings in the 80s. i do wish that i was more well versed in the cultural significance of these two events, i believe that i would come away with a far deeper understanding of this work, but alas it was amazing nonetheless.

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visceral and unblinking in its attention to the parts of society we often look away from. The framework of the forty-nine days a soul walks the earth between death and reincarnation feels resonant, as do the cyclical ebb and flow in form, themes, and imagery.

Standout poems: Commute, Midnight Sun, A Grave, I Want to Go to the Island, A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Name, Don't

[مروة الجزائري · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dead woman laughed then cried for every moment in life was so hilarious.

[Cecilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really surreal and wacky imagery that moves between the interior body and like mommy death

[Kate Learson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is intense and nightmarish. Filled with beautiful specifics that slice and dice. It felt like the death of childhood, of your mother, of gravity. Very disorienting.

[Reader liws]

wrócę do tego ponownie jak będę dorosła

[Eoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece. A haunting sequence approaching the universal conundrum of death and life feeding each other from the particulars. As a monolingual, I can not compare this translation to the original. There were none of the usual compromising seams poetry translation can engender, only a terrible, unflinching beauty.

[Jane Marga · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some traditions and religions, they believe that the souls of the departed roam around the earth for 49 days. That's why prayers, rituals, and ceremonies are held to remember and help the dead pass on to the next life.

This collection of poems about the various people who died in tragic and brutal deaths in the history of South Korea is a kind of painful reminder to all of us alive that these kinds of demise just don't happen as a mere accident or happenstance, but of systemic origin in which we conscientiously belong.

It's a heavy read for me. Not in a tear-jerking way, but in that kind of heaviness that is lacking presence, yet like a dark cloud it clings and dampens one's being. I don't usually take time reading something as short as this collection, but I knew I needed a break. As I tread on, I realized this book is a long list of unnamed deaths written as a form of vigil -- like an offering to whoever or whatever that is in charge of this business somewhere out there.

On the other hand, it reminds me that all kinds of ending, like death, lingers; not only in memory but in all faculties available at our disposal. It stays whether we are alive or not: if it's someone we love or one of our fellow being meeting theirs right before our eyes. I can't say if the same thing goes to the dead. Who knows?