Eva Maria Leuenberger

kyung

“anything can be true when the lie is good enough”

See also: 3min.rez on Vimeo (german)
      
Eva Maria Leuenberger’s collection kyung is an unconventional poetic jewel. The title refers to the poet and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 – 1982), who in 1982 “was raped and strangled by a security guard and serial rapist”. Kyung’s unpublished “book about identity, power and language”, Dictée, inspired a hommage to the poet from Leuenberger in which she, like Kyung, “probes” her own biography and her own pain. The poetic inspiration and the narrator overlap in a polyphonic text. This lends the intimate dialogue a form which makes their affinity intensely and vividly tangible. Eva Maria Leuenberger’s kyung is a literary hybrid, interweaving poetry with creative non-fiction. With her unconventional personal manuscript, the author frees herself from all formal constraints. With short passages of prose, individual poems, and brief fragments of quotes and thoughts, often repeatedly like leitmotivs, she creates a fluid yet brittle continuum which also leaves room for emptiness, for silence. The white pages reflect an oppressive silence as well as something (self-)imploring in which a passionate appeal against violence and exploitation can be heard.

In her probing exploration, Eva Maria Leuenberger avoids, as she puts it, appropriating experiences “beyond my own horizon”. She prefers to quote from other sources or from Kyung’s fantastically “disconcerting” text, which weaves together English and French passages. “I search for words – and stumble upon a body,” she notes, whereupon an English quote of Kyung’s encourages her: “tell me the story / of all these things.” The text thus naturally opens up a sphere between languages.
(Beat Mazenauer, transl. by Annie Rutherford)
     
Source: Recommended by Pro Helvetia

Translation of title: kyung

Droschl Verlag, Wien / Graz 2021

ISBN: 978-3-99059-093-5