Poets & Writers Theater

“When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb.” In this event for the Center for the Art of Translation’s annual Day of Translation, cohosted at the Center for Fiction, Don Mee Choi delivers her keynote speech about writing from the “translation womb,” her attempts to comprehend and translate the Korean War, and her definition of what it means to write in the language of translation.

In this video, South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon reads with her longtime translator Don Mee Choi, both sharing their work and speaking about their writing and collaboration with Susan Bernofsky, director of Literary Translation at Columbia University. Choi’s latest poetry collection, Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Take a microscope to the face of a beautiful woman and tell me it isn’t grotesque. Poetry is such a broad genre, it covers so many ways of looking.” Kim Hyesoon talks about her newest collection, Autobiography of a Death (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, what it means to be a female poet, and why she thinks poetry is disappearing in this 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.