Choi, Don Mee

Choi, Don Mee (c) SONG Got

Don Mee Choi, born in Seoul in 1962, is a poet and translator who writes in English. She fled with her family from South Korea to Hong Kong in 1972. She lived in the USA for a long time; but currently she is living in Berlin. Several volumes of poetry have been published by her, most recently “DMZ Colony” (Wave Books 2020). The German translation “DMZ Kolonie” (Spector Books 2023) was done by Uljana Wolf. Don Mee Choi also translates from Korean into English. She was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection “Autobiography of Death” (Bloodaxe Books 2018).

Festival Content

POETRY TALK: Kim Hyesoon & Don Mee Choi & Sool Park & Uljana Wolf

A Ghost of Collectivity

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

 

Kim Hyesoon (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do, South Korea) is one of the world’s most important poets, but remains comparatively under-read in Germany. Her books, often described as surreal, are books of the dead, too. With work at once comic, abysmal, and disturbing, Kim Hyesoon builds phantasmagorical, imagistic worlds – fever dreams, traversed by camels and other beings. These poems include mermaids who ponder their twin nature, stones that give birth to rocks which transform into dogs, and deities presiding over festering garbage dumps.

Hyesoon, Kim • Choi, Don Mee • Wolf, Uljana

Poets‘ Corner in Pankow – Weißensee

Durch Sprachen driften: Mehrsprachige Lyrik

Brotfabrik | Caligariplatz 1 | 13086 Berlin

 

What languages are used in Berlin’s poetry? How do they mix? What new languages emerge in Berlin’s poetry? What worlds of experience does multilingual poetry negotiate and what creative potential does it hold? 

The multilingual poem takes a close look at language. It illuminates its functions and effects and lets us experience different perceptions that are expressed through languages. The multilingual poem exposes the materiality of language. It works on and it changes language, it shows the inherent mutability of language. Through multilingual poetry we experience how identities are formed in and between languages and how language and a sense of home are interwoven. By evading the claim of universal readability, the multilingual poem writes actively against hierarchizations between languages and writing systems and thus becomes a gesture of resistance. 

Choi, Don Mee • Güzel, Lütfiye • Kennel, Odile • Rinne, Cia