Center for the Art of Translation Presents the Work of Korean Poet Kim Hyesoon
Center for the Art of Translation and Local Economy co-present a reading from two new translations of the work of the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon. Cindy Juyoung Ok reads her translation of The Hell of That Star (Wesleyan University Press) and Jack Saebyok Jung reads from his forthcoming translation of Lady No (HarperCollins, April 2026). A conversation moderated by R. O. Kwon will follow the readings. Books will be available for purchase and preorder from East Bay Booksellers. Free registration is required for admittance.
About The Hell of That Star
The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror. When slapped seven times by a government censor, Kim responded with defiant poems. The death of language becomes a death of the writer; within death, Kim finds new life in fragmentation and reorientation. This singular volume provides a wild and rigorous study of the words of the nation-state and the self, as well as the deprivations, detainments, and surprises in between. In evading censorship, Kim’s poems question, twist, and transmute; language is a site where the personal and political meet to escape containment, emptiness, and domestication.
About Lady No
In March 2014, Kim Hyesoon, the grand dame of contemporary Korean poetry, began to post anonymously on the online blog of Munhakdongne, a major South Korean publisher. Rather than use her own name, Kim Hyesoon’s chosen persona for these blog posts was Lady No. Fittingly, Lady No’s writings are dissenting, combative, subversive, and ontologically feminine; formally, they defy any attempt at easy categorization. They are neither poems, nor are they prose, but a radical innovation Kim calls shisanmun—an ungovernable style that heralds her internationally acclaimed works Autobiography of Death and Phantom Pain Wings.
About Kim Hyesoon
Kim Hyesoon is one of the most prominent and influential poets of South Korea. She is the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yeong Literary Award and Midang Literary Award, and her work has since been translated around the world. Among many other honors, she is a winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2019 and was the first foreign laureate to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, in 2023. Her poetry collection Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi, was named poetry book of the year in 2023 by the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Poetry Society.