A Quintet of the End and Beginning
I
I am first-rate
Kindling
Whether someone knows jack shit or only knows shit, five minutes is all I need
To pour oil on their tail and set them
Ablaze
In just five minutes
I can turn anyone into a deflated corpse
II
Listen, you’re supposed to write poetry like a raving bitch
A woman who isn’t not a woman
Writes poetry that isn’t
Not poetry
I crossed the line so hard I went into free fall
And tumbled all the way here
With barf on my
Hem
III
Eighty percent of me was
Raised by
Males
Who bred an invasive species like me
I have in me no wellspring of inspiration but
An endless geyser of
Hate
IV
Still, try
To remember
The last time you were human*
I’ve
Never once been
Human
That’s my
Pride
V
The Pope
Inside the frame
Is crashing down at full speed from his throne
Since I can still see him falling
I must be falling at his speed too—
Aren’t I, for now?
* Shin Dong-ok, Try to Remember the Last Time You Were a Poet
끝과 시작의 오중주
I
나는야 일등급
불쏘시개
X도 모르는 분도 X밖에 모르는 분도 5분이면
꼬리에 기름을 붓고 불을
붙일 수 있어
5분이면
김빠진 시체로 만들어 드린다고
II
이봐요, 시는 미친년 널뛰듯이 쓰는 거야요
여자가 아닌 것은 아닌 여자가 쓰는
시가 아닌 것은
아닌 시
난 도를 넘다 못해 곤두박질쳐
여기까지 온 거요
토사물을 앞섶에
묻힌 채
III
나를 키운 건
팔 할이
사내들이야
나 같은 생태 교란종을 키운 건
나에겐
마르지 않는 영감(靈感)의 샘이 아니라 마르지 않는 증오의
검룡소가
있어
IV
그래도, 한 번
기억해 봐
네가 마지막으로 인간이었던 때가 언제였는지*
인간이었던 적이
단 한번도
없어요
그게 나의
긍지죠
V
액자 속의
교황은
앉은자리에서 추락 중이다 전속력으로
추락중인 교황이 아직도 내 눈앞에 있는 걸 보면
나 역시 교황만큼의 속력으로
추락중인 거
맞지, 아직?
*신동옥
Like a Raving Bitch: Translating Kim Eon Hee’s Poetics of Invasion
Kim Eon Hee’s “A Quintet of the End and Beginning,” from her sixth collection GG (2020), is characteristically intertextual. While prior knowledge isn’t necessary to feel its force, the allusions extend beyond the single one she footnotes. The poem mirrors an earlier work, “A Quartet of the Late Years,” from My Dearest Oppa (2016), another ars poetica exploring writing, madness, and gender. “Quintet” situates itself within a long history of women writing against constraint. As recently as fifty years ago, Korean women writers were marked as “yeoryu jakka,” a category set apart from literature proper. Kim seizes this history of marginalization and refigures poetry as an act of reckless, even criminal, excess.
The poem opens with the speaker calling herself “first-rate / Kindling,” a winking acknowledgment of its incendiary nature. Kim has said poets write only 30-40% of a poem, leaving the rest to the reader’s emotional response. In a 2001 interview conducted at a crematorium, she remarked, “Life is unbearably dull.” To resist that dullness, she turns especially to cult films that “push imagination to the extreme” and twists exhausted language into something freakish and alive. “Quintet” is one of her less graphic poems, but this drive toward the grotesque persists.
The second section begins with a corrective declaration: “이봐요, 시는 미친년 널뛰듯이 쓰는 거야요” (“Listen, you’re supposed to write poetry like a raving bitch”). It riffs on an idiom that literally means “like a crazy bitch playing neolttwigi,” a traditional Korean women’s game where players sing and spring each other skyward from opposite ends of a plank. It is believed that yangban women invented this game to glimpse over their courtyard walls; dressed in their finest clothes and jewelry, they’d launch themselves high enough to see and be seen. Today the idiom describes erratic behavior or volatility, but Kim returns to its gendered origins, where women’s play is recast as female madness. I chose “raving bitch” to capture both the frenzy and the misogyny while retaining the line’s prescriptive punch in English. The idiom also appears in “As a Yukjabaegi,” a poem named after a type of traditional folk song, in her first collection, Trunk (1995), suggesting that for Kim, madness carries its own rhythm and musicality.
The diction reinforces the effect. The line begins with 이봐요 (“hey, look here” or “listen up”), a vernacular yet slightly formal interjection, and ends on 거야요, collapsing the blunt 거야 with the respectful 거예요. The result is ungrammatical yet oddly natural, as if the speaker asserts authority and then slaps on a veneer of politeness. This hybrid ending also rhymes with the opening 이봐요, creating a voice that is at once confrontational and intimate, one that compels the reader’s complicity. The poem immediately enacts its own advice.
The second stanza deploys doubled negatives—“a woman who isn’t not a woman,” “poetry that isn’t / Not poetry”—refusing neat categories and insisting on contradiction as a generative force. Kim has long interrogated gender in this way. In one poem, the speaker dons “paper testes” in response to real-life accusations of writing like an honorary male. In a 2023 interview with feminist critic Yang Hyo-sil, she remarked, “I am female, but am I 100% a woman? I don’t think so.” Earlier, in a 2000 article that called her work “the devil’s poetry,” she stated, “There’s probably a phallus still somewhere in my body, or maybe it’s been pulled out. Women are potentially men.” Identity, for Kim, is never fixed. The stakes become clear when we recall that Korean women writers were once classified as a separate literary species.
The poem’s third section weaponizes this history through parody. Kim subverts Seo Jeong-ju’s canonical 1939 poem “Self-Portrait,” which declares, “Eighty percent of me was raised by wind,” transforming poverty and lowly heritage into artistic destiny. In contrast, Kim writes, “Eighty percent of me was / Raised by / Males,” inverting that masculine self-mythology. Being “raised by males” becomes not a source of pride but a condition to overcome. Here the excluded poetess transforms into an “invasive species” that is impossible to contain.
This invasive poetics works through visceral imagery. The poem opens with murder by arson, and the momentum of “I crossed the line so hard I went into free fall” carries through to the ending, where the speaker perceives herself falling alongside a pope crashing from his throne. The image recalls Francis Bacon’s screaming popes, themselves appropriations of Velázquez. Bacon worked from photographs he cut, manipulated, and deformed into something violently new, a practice that mirrors her own voracious poetics. The “end and beginning” of the title are simultaneous, the instant when destruction ignites creation, when a woman launches herself into the air, screaming, laughing, or both.
In translating the poem, I sought to sustain this dangerous momentum, the urgency of someone who was never meant to write at all. When you’ve been classified as a separate species, you might as well become invasive. When they call you crazy, you get on the plank and jump higher. If you’re already falling, you might as well record the view on the way down. Who else could be so proud to declare, “I’ve / Never once been / Human”?