[One Sip of a Book] 26 Keywords About Kim Su-young: "I Like All These Countless Reactions"

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart, creating a point of contact with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

In 2021, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Kim Su-young's birth, Hankyoreh compiled 26 critical essays under the title "The Great 100 Years, Kim Su-young." A large number of 24 poets and literary critics participated as contributors. Through 26 keywords such as family, Japan/Japanese language, the Korean War, tradition, money, slang, translation, misogyny, Nietzsche, the whole body, death, and love, the book approaches Kim Su-young's biography and literary theory comprehensively.

The straight sound that calls out the straight sound, the reckless sound that breaks all regulations, harbors a death drive writhing within. Death is the principle of creative destruction worshiped by modernism. However, straightness [直] was the core of the past scholar spirit. The scholar spirit, likened to a bamboo pole, blazes with a death drive. In Kim Su-young's poetry, modernism and the scholar spirit meet at a zero point where they are indistinguishable. _p.33

Kim Su-young had to overcome both the Japanese and Cold War elements. Like Kafka, a Jew who had to write in German during a fragmented era, Japanese might have been a minority language for Kim Su-young. The old binary opposition of 'pro-Japanese literature = use of Japanese / national literature = use of Korean' shatters before his writing. Walking painfully between the two extremes, acquiring global intellect through a foreign language, he ultimately wrote with his whole body in his mother tongue, planting a vast root until it no longer hurt. _p.42

Amazingly, flowers always accompany death in Kim Su-young's poetry. Kim Su-young views the past and future of flowers from the perspective of time and change. Biologically defined, a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant. Because a flower is an organ where new life is prepared, it is also a symbol where death and birth coexist. This is precisely why flowers become a metaphor for revolution. The scene where countless deaths experienced in war and the freedom pursued even at the cost of those deaths are called by the name of flowers is the moment Kim Su-young's poetics is reborn. _p.49

All These Countless Reactions Are Good | Written by Ko Bong-jun and 23 others | 295 pages | 18,000 KRW