VOL.75/2024.10

Publishing Kim Hyesoon and International Poetry

2024.06.03

New Directions was founded in 1936 by the pioneering publisher James Laughlin when he was a student at Harvard. Laughlin conceived of New Directions as a way to introduce some of the most groundbreaking and experimental poets of the time (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, Louis Zukofsky), aiming to publish writing that “made it new” in English and other languages. He also traveled widely, introducing fiction writers and poets from abroad. Laughlin built one of the great literary lists in American publishing, and ND continues to publish international literature, following in his path.
Poetry is a vital part of our publishing program. Currently, we offer the work not just of many interesting and important American poets, but poets from other countries as well— like Bei Dao and Xi Chuan from China, Tomas Tranströmer from Sweden, Ana Luísa Amaral and Fernando Pessoa from Portugal, the French surrealist poets, and other international greats like Adonis, Osip Mandelstam, Dunya Mikhail, Eugenio Montale, and Octavio Paz. Quite a few of our authors have been Nobel Prize winners. Poetry has a smaller audience than fiction, and we find that the sales of our wider-selling fiction titles often have to support the poetry books. Still, we have had great commercial success with many poetry editions, and the poems from those books end up being anthologized, which also brings in revenue. Our editors pay close attention to literary journals and foreign publishers’ catalogs, and we receive many recommendations from the translators we work with, as well as suggestions from our own poets, who often have poet friends and who admire other writers abroad.
A recent acquisition for us is the amazing Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong and Midang Awards. In 2018, we published her remarkable Autobiography of Death, which received Canada’s prominent International Griffin Prize. Then last year, we published her book Phantom Pain Wings, which depicts the memory of war trauma and contains a rather epic sequence of “bird ventriloquy.” This book won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. Both of Kim Hyesoon’s editions were stunningly translated by award-winning poet and translator Don Mee Choi. A brilliant translation always helps in the success of publishing any foreign author, especially a poet, since poetry can be especially challenging to bring across in English.

The response to both of Kim Hyesoon’s books in the bookselling world was wonderful. We sold rights for Phantom Pain Wings to the UK publisher And Other Stories. Both books received terrific reviews in magazines and newspapers like The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. And ultimately, Kim Hyesoon’s sales were enviable for poetry. Her work has struck a chord for being able to convey emotions through a surreal language that more traditional poetic language cannot. Thanks to the financial support of LTI (Literature Translation Institute of Korea), we received a translation subsidy, and Kim Hyesoon was able to travel here for well-attended events in important poetry venues around the U.S. Since both Kim Hyesoon and her translator have a remarkable presence and read their poems beautifully, there was much enthusiasm, and the events generated even more interest for this important Korean writer.
By making sure that our galleys got into the right reviewers’ hands, promoting the books through traditional as well as social-media channels, and having author events, we were able to make sure that Kim Hyesoon’s books reached many American readers—readers not just in the poetry community, but a general audience as well. There is much interest in Korean culture here right now, perhaps due in part to the success of popular Korean-related films like “Parasite,” and other Korean art forms, like the visual arts. We hope to publish more Korean poetry and fiction in the future with the goal of broadening New Directions’s international list even further.

Written by Declan Spring (Vice president of New Directions)