Woman drags along her barking shadow kung kung

TERRAPOLIS are more than delighted to present two of the most important and influential contemporary feminist poets of South Korea at Kunsthal Charlottenborg: Kim Hyesoon and Kim Yideum. Their poetry, breath-taking, subversive, grotesque, displaying resistance and political repression, will be unfolded, on occasion of this event, through readings, talks and conversations.

The event will feature the poet and translator Don Mee Choi, who has done masterly translations of both poets, Johannes Göransson, their American publisher, and the Danish writer Maja Lee Langvad, whose writing is influenced by her connection to South Korea.

The event is in English and takes place in Chartlottenborg Art Cinema.
Free sandwiches will be provided.
Admission (normal entrance to the exhibition space): 90/50 DKK.
Supported by Statens Kunstfond and LTI Korea.

More words on and from the participants:

KIM HYESOON
Kim Hyesoon debuted her poems in 1979, where she, along with another renowned feminist poet, Ch’oe Sung-ja, were the first female poet to be published in South Korea’s prominent literary journal ‘Literature and Intellect’. With this, a woman’s poetry energized by feminist consciousness began to challenge the status quo of Korean patriarchy and oppressive conditions.

Among a lot of literary awards, Kim Hyesoon was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong Literary Award, and she has been translated into several languages from Chinese to Swedish. Her books include Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2011), I’m OK, I’m Pig! (2014) and Autobiography of Death (2018). In a conversation with Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon have said: “At the place where the body becomes anonymous, disenfranchised, and expelled, is where the language of death, women’s language, is born—language that grapples with the language of anonymity, negativity, non-gender specific language. The kind of writing that has definite subjects and objects, that depicts its objects in detail, objectifying them, then adding grandiose aphorisms to them is, of course, masculine writing that has been preserved in Korea by history. But the feminine writing of death begins from a place of emptiness/nothingness, a place that’s full with the presence of absence. In that place, there are sounds that are considered embarrassing to the world of meaning, but not at all to the world of body (sound).”

DON MEE CHOI
Don Mee Choi has, among other books, written the poetry collections Hardly War (2016) and The Morning News Is Exciting (2010). She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translations include six collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, one of Kim Yideum’s. In her introduction to Kim Hyesoon’s Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers, she writes: “For Kim the blackened space is the realm in which women from the traditional era expressed their social conditions. This realm has long been traveled by women represented in Korean shaman narratives, muga. […] For Kim the blackened space is not only the space of oppression but also a place where a woman redefines herself, retranslates herself. Therefore, I see Kim’s poetry as poetry of translation. And in my role as a translator, I guide Kim’s translated blackened self to another place, another language, across a bridge forged by history. […] It made total sense to me that Kim’s blackened realm would be populated by rats copulating, raising a family, mommy rats gnawing at baby rats, surviving hell. Kim translates hell, as a daughter of neocolony, and I translate her translated hell as a daughter from the neocolony – two daughters too many.”

KIM YIDEUM
Kim Yideum has written five books of poetry and a novel, including Cheer up, Femme Fatale (2007) and Hysteria (2014). She has received numerous awards for her poetry and has a PhD in Korean feminist poetics. Kim Hyesoon writes beautifully about Kim Yideums poetry: “Kim Yi-Deum’s poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and the landscape soars inside the confession. These two elements of her poetry are interconnected in the way eros gets pulled up to the divine place. Her poetry appears as poetry, it also appears as prose. As poetry, it’s polyphonic, and as prose, it’s defiant. Her poetry is the theater of multiple personality. You hear the voices of hundreds of people, hundreds of things. These naked living things become her poetic subjects. In each poem, the different sensations of each body are invented. She punishes herself and accepts her own unsightly, gutless face. Her poetry is engaged in the difficult process of discovering the other inside her. Her rhythm, which emerges from the fishnet of interconnections, bites power and sets her free.”

MAJA LEE LANGVAD
Maja Lee Langvad grew up in Copenhagen but was born in Seoul and lived there from 2007 to 2010. In her books, she addresses issues of transnational adoption, nationalism and racism. She was rewarded with the Bodil og Jørgen Munch-Christensens debutant prize for her book Find Holger Danske (2004) and has furthermore written Hun er vred (2014) and Dage med galopperende hjertebanken (2017).

JOHANNES GÖRANSSON
Translator, poet, critic and publisher. Johannes Göransson is an editor at the feminist anchored Action Books and its serie of Korean literature. He writes criticism about translation theory. In a conversation on Kim Hyesoon and criticism, he has said: “Why not explore the differences between sensationalism—a crossing of various boundaries, a model of art as attacking the senses—and the contextualizing or the critique? […] I do think both of these “contexts” for her [Kim Hyesoon’s] work are important, and her own critical writing certainly supports both. To me the critique—like the “original context” model of criticism—tends to stabilize and quarantine texts, especially foreign texts. I am really interested in the anxieties that surround translation: on one hand that the anxiety that the foreign influence will corrupt the domestic poetry, and on the other hand the anxiety that the translation is corrupting the foreign text.”