Written 40-50 years ago during the South Korean dictatorship from the 1970s-80s, now newly-translated into English and framed by reflective essays, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection The Hell of That Star is a violent and grotesque testament to a censored time. Having worked as an editor during the regime, Kim is familiar with the censorship apparatus that her book contends against.
A series of six poems, the first titled “That Place 1”, starts the book as a disorienting commentary on the brutal apparatus:
THAT place, that even
brightly lit shadows cannot enter,
where even with my eyes closed
inside bright sleep my skull’s throbbing
I can see, bright
THAT place, the world’s best studio
where endless episodes strung like a rotten yellow
fish bundle are hung on spikes
Kim writes, in her essay at the end of the book, how she had written these poems after refusing to reveal the name of a subversive translator, and was subsequently slapped seven times by a detective. Context provides relief: even if the violence is senseless, it is not pointless. “That Place 5”, a poem later in the same series, has more vivid, almost cinematic scenes that depict the act of violence.
In that instant interlude
when my left cheek is hit and
when my right cheek is hit
why don’t I forcefully shoot off
the last remaining of my pupils
onto the wall for a moment
bending my body like a bow
The Christian axiom of passively turning the other cheek is subverted here by Kim’s sarcastic question, suggesting that she morphs her body into a weapon of self-destruction to represent total submission. The defiant mockery is admirable, but also threatened by the fact that such a hyperbolic suggestion might be welcomed as compliance.
In both “That Place 1” and “That Place 5”, as well as other poems in the book, the jutting construction results in a dazed voice. As Kim explains in her essay: “This experience as an editor atrophied my poetry writing—reducing the word count of my poems, stiffening their rhythm, modulating my voice—and turned my poetry into ruins of themselves.” The central question then is whether these poems in the collection are the remnants of those ruins, the spoils of censorship, or the salvage.
The poet’s essay is paired with one by the translator. In “Midstness”, the translator admits that the poems she translated “sometimes refuse to make sense, creating in the wake of logic’s myth an original syntax and estranged diction.” The poem, “Not Even Knowing He Is Dead”, contains isolated examples that allow for easier examination of the effects.
Over his hollow-emptied chest
he gently ties a necktie and
on his crisp-dried hair
he applies oil and
into the intestines from which maggots crawl
he pours milk and
over his dead-feet leather
he puts on leather shoes and
through a tombstone-lined street
he dashes like wind.
The construction of “dead-feet leather” is a continuation of the compound adjectives, “hollow-emptied chest” and “crisp-dried hair” that precedes it. But this time, the components are flipped, and the decomposing human body is used to describe its own residue. Illogical syntax for an illogical world— this poem about a dead man grooming himself for the day showcases Kim’s dark humour and wit.
The Hell of That Star requires second reading—not just the poems individually, but the book as a whole. Kim’s essay on the poet’s ghostly voice and her editorial experience is crucial to a different appreciation of her work. The first impression might be upsetting, and the poems inexplicably grotesque, yet the bafflement crucially and effectively reflects the real confusion in the face of authoritarian violence. A second reading serves both as a relief and a revelation.