Autobiographie des Todes

The poems in Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiographie des Todes are translations from death’s native language. They miraculously open up the possibility of listening to this language as it sounds on the threshold of the afterlife. This volume contains a poem for each of the forty-nine days that the spirit needs for its journey after death in Buddhist tradition. In their language of the afterlife, Kim Hyesoon’s verses transcend the known and familiar and, paradoxically, succeed in making the incomprehensible—death—a little more tangible. The translations by Sool Park and Uljana Wolf immediately establish references in the target language: ‘That which is not negated, negated by nothing, is not ruled by the non-lord, for only nothingness is the lord of nothingness.’ One is reminded of Meister Eckhart: ‘When the soul enters the light that is pure, she falls so far from her own created somethingness into her nothingness that in this nothingness she can no longer return to that created somethingness by her own power.’ The translators did not just translate from Korean into German, but from one spirit language into another—they brought with them their deep knowledge of texts in the target language that also attempt to speak to death.
—Deniz Utlu

Kim Hyesoon, born in Uljin in 1955, is a poet, essayist, and critic. She studied Korean literature. Themes such as emancipation and freedom, and recurring references to historical and socio-political issues are central to her unconventional works. She is one of Korea’s most important modern poets, was the first author to receive the Midang Award, and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Sool Park, born in the Republic of Korea in 1986, has been a junior professor of intercultural philosophy at the University of Hildesheim since 2023. He has translated the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Hölderlin into Korean, among others, and writes philosophical and literary texts in German and Korean.

Uljana Wolf, born in Berlin in 1979, is a multi-award-winning poet and translator. Her most recent publications are the essay collection Etymologischer Gossip, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and the poetry collection muttertask. She has translated Valzhyna Mort, Erín Moure, Don Mee Choi, and others into German.