“Picture a bird in your mind,” Kim Hyesoon writes. “What kind of bird is it?” One American poet might imagine a blackbird (“A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one”), while another might observe a sandpiper (“His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied”). Here is a section of Kim’s poem called “Owl”:
A woman who’s lost in the woods meets a male owl.
The woman asks,
Do you know where my mommy went?
The owl answers,
How would I know your mommy? Why do women always lose their way in
the woods? Why do women think that animals can speak?
The owl rips open the skin of her face and gnaws her eyeballs.
The eyeless woman becomes an owl.
She becomes a female owl perched on a female tree.
To read Kim’s Phantom Pain Wings is to enter a parallel world in which the agonies of a rigidly gendered society are exteriorized and animated, stripped of polite society decorum, transformed into a faintly ridiculous yet vicious parable of talking animals, such as a sadistic, mansplaining owl, and interiorized again as a stationary figure, violated and sightless, “a female owl perched on a female tree,” the aggrieved inversion of Minerva’s owl of wisdom and night vision.
Encountering Kim’s work in the powerful translations from the Korean by the poet Don Mee Choi (seven of Kim’s collections so far, plus chapbooks and anthologies of poems and essays) is to be unnerved by the force of their strangeness. With each book I find myself trying to assimilate Kim’s difference, mulling over her poetic strategies and riffling through various critical formulations of uncanniness and originality that I’ve encountered, like Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” or “making strange,” Brecht’s “alienation effects,” Blanchot’s “l’étrangeté commune,” and Harold Bloom’s literary strangeness as a “mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” What does it mean to say that Kim’s poetry feels harrowingly strange and original?
Take the word “mommy” in the previous quotation. Here, as in her other translations of Kim, Choi translates 엄마(“umma”) as “mommy” even though it could be — and has been translated by other translators — as the less puerile and more neutral “mom,” because she knows that the tonality of the word summons associations appropriate for the grotesque atmosphere in Kim’s poems. The creepy unseemliness of an adult using the word “Mommy” as she seeks her lost mother calls to my mind the campy horror of the film version of Mommie Dearest with its wire hanger-wielding Joan Crawford.
This tonality is part of Kim’s world-building strategy. Throughout her oeuvre, in books like Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers and in poems like “Why Is Mommy Salty?” and the Jeanne Dielman-esque “Vanished Mommy Vanished Kitchen,” the Mommy figure, as with the other family roles (Daddy, Uncle, Grandma), is given a concrete, often bestial shape — Mommy as rat, swine, or bird (“As soon as Mommy hatched, she dressed me in a birdcage”) — while also retaining its more abstract signification as an identity that a male-dominated, Confucian society stereotypes and prescribes. The beast imaginarium, with its expectation of cartoon cuteness or infantilization, contrasts with the violence and rigidity of the social roles that she satirizes and upends, lending a creepiness and estrangement to the depiction of often dire events. (The word “creepy” appears five times in Choi’s translation of Phantom Pain Wings.)
But Kim’s strategy extends beyond tone to encompass something larger, something that begins to feel ontological. Her use of various categorical opposites, like life and death, reality and dream, and mothers and daughters, is weirdly permeable. When she writes, “Vanished mommies sit in a circle in a vanished kitchen and peel the head the way they peel an apple,” she is saying that the mommies have disappeared and are therefore incorporeal, yet somehow remain embodied enough to “sit in a circle” as they “peel the head.” The owl, who is associated in another poem with the speaker’s dead father, sees no irony in asking, “Why do women think that animals can speak?” — an obliviousness that feels brashly correct for the terrible, talking bird. In the elliptical elegies for the father called “Community of Parting,” Kim writes, “Daddy still breathes after he becomes warm ash” — that is, the dead retain the qualities of the living even after they’ve been cremated. And in the title poem, the human and the animal are intertwined with dream and reality in a circular movement, returning to where the train of thought begins:
I keep dreaming the same dream
It has the face of a human but
is a bird when it stretches out its limbs
I told you not to cut me off
I keep dreaming the same dream
Inside my bone
bird’s transparent pathway
Shaped by a lifetime of negation in a culture where women poets, once they gained the privilege to publish at all, were expected to intone the bloodless “female poetry” called yǒryusi, Kim’s death-entranced imagination uses these permeable categories to embody an imposed emptiness and give it movement and force. In an essay appended to Phantom Pain Wings, she explains that her relationship with her mother feeds back on itself in a purgatorial version of Wordsworth’s “The Child is father of the Man”: “At that place, the borderless place of life and death, I find my mommy, the dead child of my lost self.”
Written after the death of Kim’s actual father, followed “three months and ten days later” by her mother, Phantom Pain Wings delineates a terminal world where existence continues despite the absence of everything. She mentions Sylvia Plath in the poem “The Stretcher” (“Sylvia Plath has reached the bottom of the stairs in the stretcher. From now on she won’t die anymore.”), and something of Plath’s psychological extremity, provocative, unrelenting, is characteristic of Kim’s work as well. But Kim’s poetry lacks the more direct cognitive channels to autobiography that made Plath a source of relentless fascination for psychoanalytic critics. It might be possible to interpret a phrase in a Kim poem as a commentary on real events and people in her life, but not with the same prurient voracity as readers have unpacked “Every woman adores a Fascist” for what it ostensibly revealed about the toxic masculinity of Otto Plath or Ted Hughes. “Poetry is a place where names are never called out,” Kim cautions in her book inspired by the 2014 Sewol ferry sinking, Autobiography of Death (2016). “It is a place where names are erased.”
Phantom Pain Wings may depict altered visitations from real life (“Daddy, I become bird in the room where you died”), but its aviary of tormented experiences arises from an imagination invested in something as much macrocosmic — cultural, societal, political — as it is personal and individual. In books like Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2011-2012) and Autobiography of Death she recasts into fictionalized or mythologized form such themes as the terrible diminution of women in Korean society (“I’m that woman / that hideous, filthy woman / that woman, her stomach full of oblivion”), the inhumanity of government bureaucracies (“I float with the back of my head facing the sky”), and the spectral presence of the countless victims who perished in the Korean War and the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship that followed (“Revenge revenge revenge / My eyeballs roll back even in my sleep”). In all of her books, including Phantom Pain Wings, her keening abysses can be harrowing, but I don’t hear the inwardly directed howl of Plath’s Ariel, its author a few months from suicide. In fact, Kim’s vision has more of the mythic texture of Hughes’s Crow (“his every feather the fossil of a murder”), although it inhabits a realm at the receiving end of masculine violence rather than the mythos of one elucidating his own internalized brutality: “There came news of a word. / Crow saw it killing men. He ate well.”
Kim was born in 1955, at a time when millions had recently died in war and many families were newly divided by the 38th parallel, and she came of age amid the depredations of the U.S.-sponsored regimes of Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, and others. Under the Chun regime, Kim was once taken to a police station and slapped repeatedly by an officer who wanted her to disclose information about the translator of a feminist book that she was editing. Despite some changes in the now-affluent society, where a woman like Kim can win all of Korea’s major literary prizes, the situation for women remains in crisis, with the widest gender pay gap of any developed country and lack of support for childcare and domestic work that has led to the lowest birth rate in the world, with potentially severe social disruptions to come. The current conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was elected in large part because of an anti-feminist platform, appealing to disaffected young men, the idaenam, by claiming that gender inequality didn’t exist.
Kim now lives in Seoul with her husband, the playwright Lee Kang-baek, and their daughter, and had a long career as a writing professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. The 23 books of poetry, essays, and other collected writings listed on her website, including the Griffin Prize-winning Autobiography of Death, attest to a creative energy that remains unstinting. Among poets in Anglophone countries, admiration for her work has steadily grown over the last two decades thanks mainly to the translations by Choi, an acclaimed poet as well, a Korean-born Seattle resident, winner of the National Book Award for her own vision of neocolonial oppression in South Korea, DMZ Colony.
Choi has included a diary of her collaboration with Kim on the translation of Phantom Pain Wings, and the exchanges illuminate something surprising about Kim’s work, the brimming joy about creativity and the making of art that emanates from her dark, imaginative universe. Her wordplay can be prodigious. Two of the diary entries are about the use of the Korean double s sound (ㅆ) in the poems “Double S/Double S” and “A Blizzard Warning.” “ㅆ” is equivalent to the past tense ending “-ed.” It also happens to fit the bird theme of the book because, as Kim says, “Birds have double s [ㅆㅆ]dangling from their feet.” Here’s a passage from “A Blizzard Warning”:
Your confession destroys me. It destroys my mommy. It destroys my sister. In the dead garden a parade of whitest birds. The past that you can’t tell anyone about—do you really want to know? Want to hear about it? Bird threatens me, slaps me with its wings, then takes off its wings and pulls down its underwear.
All the “~ㅆ” word endings that have left before me are falling
They fall down like trousers, holding hands, in pairs, running through the
blizzard ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ
Part ~ed
Di ~ed
Forgott ~ed
Your same dreadful confession once again
(also known as) my past, suffocating the sprouts
You’re not here, only I’m here ~ed ~ed ~ed
You dress my naked body in a shroud all night long
The original Korean also includes the bird spoor (ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ ㅆㅆ) but in a slightly different location, with the line “You’re not here, only I’m here ~ed ~ed ~ed,” a translation choice that implicitly explains what the wordplay is about. By leaning into the pictorial aspect of Kim’s language but avoiding obscurity, Choi makes sure that the English version overcomes its inherent obtuseness about such linguistic devices, creating a skillfully hybrid Korean-English version that does justice to the original meaning. The choice to translate past tense verbs as “part- ed,” “di- ed,” and “forgott -ed,” emphasizing the ㅆ endings in the original with playful English solecisms, made me laugh aloud, despite the seriousness of the context. (The “confession” that the speaker has received in a letter, which is also “her past,” remains darkly unnamed.)
A few lines later, at the end of the poem, I was amused again when she concludes, “Shitty word endings that make up my past!” It turns out that the scatological appropriateness of Choi’s translation here crosses both languages. The original line contains the word “똥구멍” (asshole), so a more literal translation would be “Asshole word endings that make up my past!” But the verb ending “ㅆ” can sound like the word “shit” in English, so Choi’s translation is one of many choices that stray from the literal but end up making the English version a better approximation than a word-for-word rendering would. In a pamphlet called Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode (2020), Choi writes of her translations of Kim, “I want to make impossible connections between the Korean and the English, for they are misaligned by neocolonial war, militarism, and neoliberal economy.”
While Kim is almost never concrete about her political beliefs (Autobiography of Death only alludes to the government and corporate malfeasance that exacerbated the ferry disaster that is its subject), her works of the imagination seek not only to summon the textures of injustice in her society but to overwhelm them with a creative efflorescence that annihilates and remakes language and meaning. “Bird,” the creature that is mentioned over 400 times in Phantom Pain Wings, is a case in point. It is not simply one thing but a loosely concatenated metaphor made up of emotions, provocations, prevarications, and contradictions, all shifting and accreting in a swirl of reverberating plangencies. Its use is deliberately excessive.
The title of the book suggests that bird may be a subjective marker of psychological affliction and neurasthenia, and there’s some evidence of that: “Every bird has a different weather system, different mental illness” or “Flutter-flutter-anxiety disorder, spasm disorder / That’s how bird became a bird.” But bird is also the voice of the self, of the consciousness that natters ceaselessly while we’re alive:
Bird talks only about me even when I tell it to stop or change the topic
It’s always the same story like the sound of the high heels of the woman,
walking around in the same pair all her life
This is why I have a bird that I want to break
The clacking heels — “Bird in high heels” — suggest it could be woman as an abstract entity, the state of womanhood in a patriarchal society: “Every bird shouts, / To my most beloved daughter in the whole wide world.” A scene at what may be the patriarch’s — Daddy’s — deathbed suggests that it could be death itself: “Bird shitting in flight / crashes into the window of the hospital room.” But the bird is also an existential state (“we were like birds, each trapped inside a lightbulb”) and a life force that alters the vivacity of life itself: “the world becomes as flat as a mirror if bird doesn’t fly / that’s why my bird flies even in sleep.” Yet if it is the life force, it can be nasty and unspeakably defiled: “My eyes and bird’s once met. The world was never so quiet. Bird’s eyes were like the eyes of a child quietly shitting blood.”
How does Kim’s poetry employ this profligate, contrarious figure without feeling diffuse and out of control? The answer lies, in part, through her defamiliarization process, the means by which Kim makes the world strange or, more precisely, estranges us into her world, a process that showcases a strength of Choi’s translation, its uncompromising manifestation of aspects of the Korean language. The book opens with the poem “Bird’s Poetry Book”:
This book is not really a book
It’s an I-do-bird sequence
a record of the sequence
In the next lines we encounter “I-do-bird-woman sequence,” “Woman-is-dying-but-bird-is-getting-bigger sequence,” and “I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-I-was-part-of-bird sequence,” among others. A more idiomatic English translation would be “It’s a sequence in which I am doing bird,” but one of the qualities of Korean is the use of particles like 는(neun) and 은 (eun) to introduce a topic. “It’s an I-do-bird sequence” (새하는 순서) is a literal version of “bird-doing-[topic particle neun] sequence.” The opening poem frames the rest of the book, the “poetry book,” within the frame of “I do bird.” And then immediately Kim layers on other frames, other sequences, that the book will be about. It’s not merely an I-do-bird sequence, but an “I-do-bird-woman” sequence, thus incorporating a feminist perspective. Then it becomes something different and wider still, hinting at a critique of a patriarchal society where women are diminished while the oppressor gains in strength: “Woman-is-dying-but-bird-is-getting-bigger sequence.” The last example, “I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-I-was-part-of-bird,” pushes the argument—for that is what Kim is creating with these metamorphosing, nominative phrases—into something wider still, the nature of reality, self, and identity. The norm that she establishes with these strange assertions is one of growth and regression, of widening and contracting gyres and tenuous redefinitions, all in the service of an uncompromising veracity about life as she knows it.
Both Kim’s emotional relentlessness and Choi’s uncompromising translation reach an apex in a poem called “Chorus” from the last section of the book, which opens with a boy’s chorus singing. At first we enter the boys’ memories and lives. “The guy with the clearest voice is motherless—even his father has run off.” Then suddenly the boys are men. There’s a tone-deaf guy over 70 years old, who “kidnapped a girl and hid her in an attic.” There’s a man who finished his military training long ago, “yet it’s never been erased from his body.” There’s a murderer “cutting up the dead girl.” We see the remains of their victims becoming dust. The landscape has become one of unhinged patriarchy trained in violence and war.
As often happens in Kim’s poems, the perspective suddenly shifts from omniscient to personal. The critique of male dominance becomes clearer. As the men sing “Ode to Joy,” the narrator appears, a meek, submissive woman who is following “the guy”: “Good good! I kneel at the guy’s feet.” The guy has made her kneel in a storage unit “filled with broken pianos.” As she kneels, she says, “I speak like a broken piano.” The storage unit is now a scene of impending rape. Kim writes, “I take off my pants, but”—ending the line mid-thought, devastatingly.
Now the chorus is in a kind of military prison, and “the drill sergeant” is a former poet who likes to memorize poems he wrote outside of prison. These poems are all fond but horrific memories of patriarchal oppression, and like the “I-do-bird sequence,” Kim’s Korean subsumes each memory in a frame, this time that of “poem” instead of “sequence,” using the topic marker 는 (neun). Again, Choi doesn’t normalize the lines but leaves them in a Koreanized form, adding to their bluntness:
Tears spurt out like piss — poem
Beats his wife, then embraces — poem
His wife’s hair flows down like rain — poem
Male lyric caresses — poem
He wants to cry every night, but he shits on — poem
In an aside that seems related to an actual experience that Kim had (she felt compelled to refuse a prize in 2017 because her selection caused so much outrage among men), the speaker adds, “He has a poem about wanting to hit a woman poet he met at an awards ceremony.” The emotional range is an uncanny mix of absurd, vicious, scatological, resentful, comic, and perhaps campy (“male lyric caresses”).
Kim’s mature work has always displayed a prodigal outpouring of lyrical and imaginative invention with a confident command of her own strangeness, finding ways to make poetry out of deep reservoirs of political outrage, an almost reflexive, ontological curiosity, and a grotesque detailing of people and objects that is mostly metaphorical. Even when dealing with tragic subjects, the poems manifest a sometimes profound sense of humor. I think of a poem from Poor Love Machine (1997, translation 2016), called “The Story in Which I Appear as All the Characters 1,” where the speaker interacts with various selves at different pivotal moments in their lives simultaneously: “The unmarried-me slaps me on the cheek, the now-me sitting in a park, and the seventy-year-old-me comforts the just-got-slapped me.”
She has been lucky to have as her English collaborator a poet who is her equal in forthrightness and invention. Compare the French translation of Autobiography of Death by Koo Moduk and Claude Murcia with Choi’s version. For “A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Choi chooses to employ Kim’s compressed phrasing from the outset: “Yourfatherinheaven. Belovedbullshitfather. Heasksforthechild.” In Autobiographie de la mort, the compression comes only after the tamed and undistinctive phrases “Ton père qui est aux cieux. Que son nom soit vomit. Savez-vous il me dit de lui donner cet enfant.” Choi’s English style doesn’t hesitate to replicate Kim’s bluntness and velocity.
One of Choi’s earliest translations of Kim, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, describes the censorship that was the “blackened space” of cultural life during the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship after the Korean war, what Choi calls “the space of oppression but also a place where a woman redefines herself, retranslates herself.” It could be a recipe for the kind of dour and doctrinal work that Harold Bloom used to vilify as exemplars of the “School of Resentment,” where the quality of the writing was subservient to the advancement of oppressed identities: “feminist cheerleaders proclaim that women writers lovingly cooperate with one another as quilt makers.” And yet, when Kim talks about being force-fed the male canon while living in a society that segregated female writing, she is anything but humorless:
I, a woman poet, devour one hundred fathers
and become a father
(How repulsive! Now I will have a five o’clock shadow)
Thirty years after Bloom’s The Western Canon appeared, this book by a proudly resentful Korean feminist poet stood out among recent poetry books for its strangeness and originality. And I mean “original” in the Bloomian sense of being “an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations,” because Kim has found something fresh in the material she employs, which happens to be the female oppression that was a primary subject of Bloom’s bête noire, Adrienne Rich, as well as other themes of institutionalized and structural injustice, like the violence and repression of the American-sponsored regimes, and the spiritual desolation that arose from South Korea’s unrelenting development. What Kim does with the beast universe and with language on a word-by-word and line-by-line basis amounts to a set of techniques, akin to Brechtian alienation effects, to create what Maurice Blanchot called a “relationship with the unknown” (un rapport avec l’inconnu). It is difficult to reach the end of her invention, because it is of the enigmatic, ramifying kind that “cannot be assimilated,” in Bloom’s phrase. At times the strangeness transports me to something primal and “original” in the sense of pertaining to origins, like the emotional extremity I encounter in ancient tragedy, as when Clytemnestra nurses a snake in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, “She gave it to her breast to suck — she was dreaming.”
There are snakes in Phantom Pain Wings, too, and they’re related to mommies. “A barrel carrying five crying mommies rolls along,” she writes. One of them, “today’s corpse,” is cremated, and a barrel, now carrying four mommies, keeps rolling along. “Long strands of hair stick to a barrel, wriggling like moist snakes, laying eggs.” What does it mean for snakes to be laying eggs from the mommies’ hair? Medusa-haired, crying, corpse mommies in barrels are more than enough, but the addition of the eggs tips the image into the grotesque and unassimilable territory that makes Kim such a powerful interpreter of the oppressive absurdity of modern life. Even more haunting is another poem about bird and Mommy, in which the characteristic tone of much of Kim’s work, its eerie mixture of the sardonic and the agonized, is subdued by a rare moment of what feels like real-life familial grief:
Farewell First
Bird and bird conversed. They conversed on the treetop, on the rooftop with a lightning rod between them. It was freezing that day. Body was inside a toasty-warm room, crying for no apparent reason. Birds’ conversation had no body in it. Birds stared at each other like two hands that fell from my body.
Bird begins with farewell first, so what do farewell and farewell talk about when they meet? Bird once started trembling inside my body. Bird may have even fluttered. Bird said, Future doesn’t exist since farewell has already begun. Bird and bird pecked on Future and conversed amiably.
The monk who had attained nirvana was always beneath the same tree, and bird always perched on the head of the same monk.
Bird and body said they knew about each other’s existence. The day I was so sick, I saw one bird falling from the sky.
Body said that sometimes it can feel bird’s visit. Today, bird took my body to the darkest canyon. Body screamed silently, broke into a cold sweat, and flash opened its eyes. Bird left.
On Friday night, traffic came to a halt, so I was stuck in my car on the bridge over the Han River. After the eye surgery, Mommy was alone in bed, her eyes bandaged. Bird flew over to her first and stroked her eyelids.
At that moment, Mommy said she had called out my name.
[Published by New Directions Publishing on May 2, 2023, 208 pages, $18.95 US paperback]