Two Voices Salon: Poet and Translator Don Mee Choi Discusses Korean Poet Kim Hyesoon
Center for the Art of Translation | 582 Market Street, Suite 700 | San Francisco, CA
We were very honored to host poet and translator Don Mee Choi in the Two Lines Press offices to discuss her work with Korean poet Kim Hysoon in a conversation with Two Lines Press’s Veronica Esposito. The conversation centered around Choi’s latest translation of Kim’s work, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, which was published in 2014 by Action Books, although it spanned the length of Choi’s involvement with Kim, which goes back to the early 2000s and the many translations they have collaborated on. The conversation included discussions of Action Books’ ideas of translation (epitomized in publisher Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney’s Deformation Zone), the aesthetic of the “gurlesque,” Kim as a feminist writer, and Kim’s overall stance vis a vis K Pop, the history of Korean literature, and international culture.
AUDIO TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Introductions
2:25 Where did you first discover Kim Hyesoon’s poetry?
4:35 The chellenges of first finding a publisher for Kim Hyesoon’s writing
6:25 Why was Action Books so interested in Kim Hyesoon based off of just two poems in Circumference?
8:10 The translation philosophy of Action Books, as represented by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney
11:05 Kim Hyesoon as a poet that crosses national and generic boundaries
13:30 Kim Hyesoon compared to the Korean traditions of poetry, especially compared to the masculine traditions, and how contemporary issues creep in to her work, with reference to “I’m OK, I’m Pig”
16:30 Poems of Kim Hyesoon’s that have personally affected Don Mee Choi
19:25 Kim Hyesoon’s influence on Don Mee Choi’s poetry
21:25 The complexity of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry and the difficulty of interpreting it
24:30 How does Don Mee Choi translate when she doesn’t understand exactly what Kim Hyesoon means?
27:00 Does the poetry mutate as you translate it? (With bilingual example)
35:45 The “gurlesque” as it applies to Kim Hyesoon’s poetry
39:20 Kim Hyesoon as a feminist writer
41:30 Kim Hyesoon as contrasted against Korean culture at large, and the sorts of Korean literature that gets promoted by the government
46:50 audience Q & A
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), the National Book Award-winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016). She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Kim Hyesoon is one of the most prominent poets of South Korea. Along with several female poets of the 1980s and 1990s, Kim has developed a new terrain of poetry that has been described as “combative, visceral, subversive, innovative, and ontologically feminine,” and which continues to flourish.
Veronica Scott Esposito has worked in the field of translated literature for over a decade. She specializes in Latin American and Mitteleuropan literature.