J2 summer intern Quinn Gruber writes on three translated titles that parse loss: Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, Time by Etel Adnan, and To the Ashes by Anzhelina Polonskaya.
Kim Hyesoon & Don Mee Choi, February, 2009, Chicago AWP bookfair
Among recent notices on my Facebook feed was one for the new issue of Big Bridge, in particular a feature on “Neo-surrealism,” edited by Adam Cornford. Cornford’s expansive introduction to the feature, which looks back to the history of surrealism and forward to his selection of living poets, includes this definition of his subject: “What defines a Surrealist poetry today, then, is what has defined it from the outset . . . Surrealist poetry can only be ‘a cry of the mind determined to break apart its fetters.’ It must contribute, intentionally or otherwise, to the liberation of the mind ‘and all that resembles it.’” I’m not here to argue against the mind’s liberation, rather to suggest that newer forms of surrealism can be used effectively to record what occurs before the imagined line break in Cornford’s phrase, “the mind determined to break apart / its fetters.” The breaking apart of a mind, most familiar to me as a product (or anti-product) of dementia and Alzheimer’s, can be tracked through what I’ve elsewhere called “documentary surrealism.”
Translating grief
Quinn Gruber
J2 summer intern Quinn Gruber writes on three translated titles that parse loss: Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, Time by Etel Adnan, and To the Ashes by Anzhelina Polonskaya.