6/10/25
Tue,
20:00

Book Premiere: Kim Hyesoon (in German and Korean language)
Autobiography of Death

Poesiefestival Berlin 2025
silent green
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(c) JJung Melmel
(c) Villa Massimo Alberto Novelli
(c) Yegyu Shin

At the 2023 Poesiefestival Berlin, South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do) delivered the Berlin Poetry Lecture, which was published by Wallstein Verlag under the title Tongueless Mother Tongue. This was met with great acclaim and was even compared by critics to the work of Paul Celan. Back then, the Poesiefestival commissioned Uljana Wolf and Sool Park to translate poems by Kim Hyesoon from her 2016 collection Autobiography of Death, which ultimately led to the full German edition, recently published by S. Fischer Verlag. Together with the poet and her two translators, we are celebrating the German translation’s premiere.

Through poetic means, Kim Hyesoon practices a kind of “channeling” of voices from the afterlife. In fact, the genesis of Autobiography of Death was the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, in which 304 people lost their lives. Kim Hyesoon describes South Korea as a country with a very high density of ghosts and, as a poet, considers herself to possess innate insight into death. The book is comprised of 49 sections, reflecting the Buddhist legend that a soul wanders around an intermediate realm for the same number of days after death. Kim Hyesoon’s poetics is one of “passage,” where the difference between self and other, life and death, dissolve.

Kim Hyesoon defines a poem as “the eternal arrival of the ghost speaker.” Her texts are written in “black letters” and reality is presented as if through “icicle glasses”—a reality where houses flutter and stones drip from the moon’s “full cheeks.”

It is thus fitting that Kim Hyesoon considers it to be ideal when everything perceived is expressed simultaneously in her poems: “a wide field of pure presence.”

Sool Park and Uljana Wolf will also be giving insights into their TOLEDO journal, which illustrates their translation process and will be published on toledo-programm.de in time for the event.

The event will be interpreted into Korean and German.
Kindly supported by: LTI Korea, Toledo
The event takes place in silent green's Kuppelhalle.