Event Type
The poem “Bat” begins innocuously, “Because our beds are on different continents / when I go to sleep you wake up / and when I wake up you go to sleep”—and continues, “Have you received the pair of hands I sent you yesterday?” Such are the turns present everywhere in the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, a prominent South Korean poet known for her vivid and surreal imagery of the feminine. The collection A Drink of Red Mirror, originally published in 2004, was translated by a team and published in English in 2019. Entering the collection is to enter the landscape of the poet's body and mind where her hands can at once write a poem and hang like bats from a ceiling a continent away. Fragmented then knitted back together in fantastic ways, the poet's body is simultaneously her own but also a fabric where the mythological and technological past and present of Korea manifest. Kim Hyesoon gives new meaning to the lyrical/poetic/feminine you, whom she releases from the prison of the poem and the prison of the body of the poet herself. Co-translators Lauren Albin and Sue Hyon Bae present a reading and discuss the unusual translation project.
