These deft, nuanced, and unmannered translations of Kim Eon Hee's poems introduce a genuinely exciting poet to the English-speaking world, one whose work reveals for us the limitations of our conceptions of what poetry is and the colonial legacies that structure our basic concepts of poetry, such as the gendered and raced expectations of the poetic speaker and of what counts as "experimental" writing. Kim's poetry, as the translators write, is "unafraid of graphic disappointment or the pits": she brilliantly violates our idea of what is acceptable for an Asian female poet to say out loud.
Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, Gyeongsang Province. She is the author of five volumes of poetry. Her first collection Modern Ars Poetica was published in 1989. Followed by, Trunk, The Girl who Sleeps Under a Withering Cherry Tree, Unexpected Response, and her latest from 2016 The Man I Miss. First published in 2011, Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?, is her fourth poetry collection, and the first of her books' to be translated into English.
Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: literary studies, critical digital studies, poetics, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her writings have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Deep Fakes from the Algorithm's & Society series, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review amongst others. She is the author of gospel of regicide, published by Noemi Press in 2017, and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee's poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her forthcoming academic monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale's Poynter Fellowship.
Sung Gi Kim is an award-winning journalist and photographer who writes about Asian affairs with a focus on the Korean Peninsula. He is a Seoul correspondent and producer for Thomson Reuters. He was part of a team that produced a documentary on South Korea's education system, which won silver at the 2016 New York Festivals. His work has been published in The Sunday Times, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Nikkei Asian Review and United Press International.
"Sung Gi Kim's and Eunsong Kim's deft, nuanced, and unmannered translations of Kim Eon Hee's poems introduce a genuinely exciting poet to the English-speaking world, one whose work reveals for us the limitations of our conceptions of what poetry is and the colonial legacies that structure our basic concepts of poetry, such as the gendered and raced expectations of the poetic speaker and of what counts as 'experimental' writing. Kim's poetry, as the translators write, is 'unafraid of graphic disappointment or the pits': she brilliantly violates our idea of what is acceptable for an Asian female poet to say out loud. The backdrop to Kim's playful 'absurdist' poetry is the neoliberal and neocolonial context of contemporary South Korea and its relationship to the United States, the two countries in the Kims' words, 'economic and political collaborators.' They rightly describe Kim Eon Hee's poetry as 'an unexpectedly politicized space,' as, equally so, are their translations—and, indeed, all poetry and all translations." - Dorothy Wang
"In Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? Kim Eon Hee writes compellingly against the grain of neocolonialist, neoliberal K-culture, producing a poetry that grapples towards weakness, the Korean undercommons, language's and life's true, failed becoming-in-the-world. Mirroring Kim's practice, Sung Gi Kim and Eunsong Kim brilliantly record their own anxiety and impasse as and in translation, in the introduction and the body of the poems themselves: the result is a resonant and clarifying 'semblance of feeling…we can witness only outside of language.'" - John Keene
