hankyoreh

Poet Kim Hye-soon’s (pictured) “Phantom Pain Wings” (trans. Don Mee Choi) became not only the first work of Korean poetry, but the first book of poetry in translation to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. 

South Korean poet Kim Hye-soon won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry with her collection, “Phantom Pain Wings,” making her the first South Korean to clinch the prestigious award.
 
This also marks the first time since the critics association’s inception in 1975 that a translated book of poetry was awarded the prize. “Phantom Pain Wings” was translated by Don Mee Choi, a Korean American poet and translator based in the US.

The association of critics and editors presented its awards for books published in 2023 on Thursday (local time) in New York. The awards cover six categories: fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism.
 
Kim’s “Phantom Pain Wings,” the only translated work among the finalists in the poetry category, beat out Saskia Hamilton’s “All Souls,” Romeo Oriogun’s “The Gathering of Bastards,” Robyn Schiff’s “Information Desk,” and Charif Shanahan’s “Trace Evidence,” for the poetry honor.  

All of the finalists, apart from Kim and Oriogun, who is Nigerian, are American poets.

Jeffrey Yang, editor-at-large at New Directions, accepts the NBCC award on Kim’s behalf at the ceremony held in New York on March 21, 2024, local time. (still from live feed)

The NBCC introduces the collection as one that “presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism that Kim Hyesoon calls an ‘I-do-bird sequence’: ‘Bird cuts me out / like the way sunlight cuts out shadows // Hole enters/ the spot where I was cut out/ I exit.’”
 
The two poets were not present at the awards ceremony. While accepting the award on Kim’s behalf, the collection’s editor, Jeffrey Yang read a message from Kim. 

“I think gender is a verb, not a noun,” the message read. “Thank you for choosing your other Asian woman. […] This book was written with Don Mee Choi. I feel like we are accepting this award together.”

On Friday, Kim told the Hankyoreh about her reaction to winning the award. 

“I didn’t attend the award ceremony because I was afraid that I’d be sitting on the sidelines, seeing that my collection was the only translated work to be shortlisted since the prize was established in the 1970s.” Neither the poet nor the US publisher expected to take home the prize.
 
“Phantom Pain Wings,” which embodies gender oppression in the form of a being called “bird,” was originally published in 2019 by Moonji Publishing. It is Kim’s 13th poetry collection. Kim entered the literary field by winning a 1978 spring literary contest for criticism and made her official debut as a poet the following year. The collection’s English translation was published by New Directions Publishing in May 2023, with support from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI).
 
The New York Times also named it one of the five best poetry books of 2023 at the end of the year.
 

Kim Hye-soon and frequent collaborator Don Mee Choi, who translated Kim’s “Phantom Pain Wings.” (courtesy of Moonji Publishing)

Choi has translated many of Kim’s works into English, including “Autobiography of Death” (originally published in 2016), “Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream” (originally published in 2011), “Poor Love Machine” (originally published in 1997, awarded the Kim Su-young Literary Award).
 
Choi’s translations have won her the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2012 and 2019, with “Autobiography of Death” being the first Korean poetry collection to win the Griffin Poetry Prize’s international category in 2019. In 2021 she also received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. Her own poetry collection, “DMZ Colony,” won her a National Book Award in 2020.
 
The National Book Critics Circle is a nonprofit organization founded in 1974 by book critics from the American press and publishing industry and has been presenting annual awards since 1975 to recognize the finest books published in English.
 
“Kim has already won five awards for poetry, a category that has always been considered a wasteland for translated works due to the difficulties of translation. Her work is transcending cultural barriers to fill readers all around the world with wonder and inspiration,” LTI said in a statement on Kim and Choi’s winning of the award. 

By Im In-tack, staff reporter

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