Kim Hyesoon, _Autobiography of Death_, trans. Don Mee Choi

THE COVER OF DMZ Colony mentions that Choi is the translator of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, which reminded me that I had acquired this at some point and not gotten around to reading it...so it seemed like an opportune moment.

The English translation (from New Directions) includes an interview of Kim by Choi, in which we learn of a traditional Korean belief that after death, the soul circulates for 49 days before it is reincarnated. The 49 poems of the main part of the book correspond to these 49 days, so we might read them as the soul's circulation in this liminal zone among perceptions, memories, and anticipations. So we have something a bit like the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which provides the epigraph of one of the poems) or the second chapter of Han Kang's novel Human Acts, in which we get the narration of Jeong-Dae, a young man shot by the government's troops at the Gwangju Uprising (which is part of the background of "Autopsy (Day 24)").

That may make the book sound a bit more domesticated than it is, though. The explanation about the 49 days draws a kind of faint outline around the book's turbulence, we might say, but does not resolve or quell that turbulence. Autobiography of Death is a wild ride through a phantasmagoria with continually  metamorphosing characters. Is the "you" frequently addressed in the book the soul, or death, or something else, something restlessly mobile? I was never entirely sure.

"Name (Day 42)" put me in mind of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, to give you an idea how trippy the book gets. I would cite "Mommy of Death (Day 26)," "Hiccups (Day 31)," "Lord No (Day 36)," and "Don't (Day 49)" as providing similarly harrowing pleasures.

The book includes a long (16 pages) poem not part of the main sequence proper--"Face of Rhythm"--that seems to track a long, difficult, elusive illness. Placed in the same book as "Autobiography of Death," it's as if the anxiety of being alive is looking through a window at the anxiety of being dead.

Oh, and speaking of Han's Human Acts: Choi mentions in a note at the end of the book that Kim Hyesoon worked as an editor during the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, in which post she dealt with a play that was entirely redacted by the censor and with being slapped in the face seven times by a government official for withholding information about an author. Exactly these affronts happen to Kim Eun-sook in the third chapter of Han's novel. Kim Hyesoon must be a model for Kim Eun-sook, to some extent, which makes me wonder, was Kim Hyesoon actually present at Gwangju, as Han's Kim Eun-sook was? Probably not, as Choi likely would have mentioned that, but I did wonder.