Book Reviews1

• Polish(Polski)

  [POLISH] I Love You and I Love Your Death, Too

  When someone raised within Western culture encounters Buddhist traditions of living and dying, they may experience a (positive) culture shock because the focus is so entirely different. In Buddhism, God does not make an appearance at the moment of death. Instead, a dialogue takes place with the dead, and the boundary between life and death is revealed to be both fainter than one might imagine and traversable in both directions. Kim Hyesoon draws on this tradition in her absorbing collection of poems, Autobiography of Death. In Autobiography of Death, there are clear echoes of Buddhist beliefs, according to which the boundary between life and death is so blurred and porous that one is daily “breast-feeding the whimpering young deaths” (as it is phrased in Don Mee Choi’s English translation, also referenced below). After death there is a transition period of forty-nine days—bardo—between the end of life and a new reincarnation. This provides the frame and theme of Kim’s work. In Autobiography, death takes different forms: solipsism, despair, out-of-body experiences, a Miłosz-esque “loneliness of the dying”* (and even of the dead), liminality and a coming together of the worlds of the living and the dead, universality and primordiality, and the coming into being (or out of being) of funeral rituals, the origins of which reach back to the first attempts to “capture” and take control, visually, of another human being. Take for example this excerpt from “A Lullaby / Day Thirty-Seven”: * Czesław Miłosz, “Campo di Fiori,” The Collected Poems 1931-1987. The mother of the child dug a hole and buried her child in the middle of her room. She also buried her child in the ceiling. Buried her in the wall. Buried her in her pupils. This is the “motherly way of approaching death,” which Louis Vincent-Thomas writes about in his essay on the foundations and establishment of thanatology. Kim sometimes presents death as aggression as well (in the first poem, a dying woman is attacked on the subway), paralleling the discussion in Vincent-Thomas’s essay. Death in Autobiography is a polyphonic and collective phenomenon. This is still the case when it occurs as a matter of fact and the speaker of a poem is faced with the trauma of a shared tragedy. The volume also speaks of the perverse nature of memory, the function of which proves to be “extinguishing” untrammeled manifestations of vitality: Citizens laughed inside princess’ head It was useless giving orders to arrest those who laughed for the laughter belonged to the dead It was recorded long ago like a laugh track An order was given to make princess laugh but no one showed up (Kim Hyesoon, “Face of Rhythm”) Autobiography places death in dialogue with European thanatology and philosophy in various ways. Although Vincent-Thomas defines death as the inability to make plans for the future, in “Commute / Day One,” the speaker of the poem addresses the dying woman thus: “You head towards the life you won’t be living”. In Autobiography, the dying or deceased person is still spoken to and given instructions about how to behave in bardo, which presupposes their ability to understand. Furthermore, in the poem “Photograph / Day Three,” which portrays the human body as a mistreated doll, the line “It may come back to life when you die” points to a paradox of the soul, which can, in Foucault’s words, become a “prison of the body.” Reading Autobiography of Death is somewhat overwhelming, but it leaves you breathless with delight at the sheer beauty of the tradition of imagination and creativity it inhabits. For the European reader, it offers a valuable lesson in the “art of dying” within a community that is not restricted to the “accumulation of scientific and technology goods, which makes a human being into a producer-consumer-commodity,” in the words of Vincent-Thomas. The individual is rather—thanks to the rich tradition of Buddhism—primarily an “accumulation of beings,” recognized as the most valuable human capital. Immersed in relationships and collaboration, “death is accepted there, it becomes an affair of the entire community and subject to ritual.” As the late Krystyna Miłobędzka, a poet and precursor of the neolinguist movement in Polish poetry, wrote in an untitled poem from Po krzyku (2005), “I love you and I love your death, too." translated by Jonathan Baines

  2026-02-05

  by Weronika Stępkowska

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