Heo Su-gyeong


Heo Su-gyeong was a Korean poet.

Life

Heo Su-gyeong was born in 1964 in Jinju, Gyeongsangnam-do. Heo after a brilliant literary debut at the age of twenty-three, left Korea abruptly after publishing just two volumes of poetry. She currently resides in Germany, pursuing a doctorate degree in Philology in the Department of Ancient Oriental Studies at University of Münster. In 2003 she married Reinhard Dittmann, a german archaeologists of the Near East.

Work

Heo infuses her poetry with the lyricism and the images taken from traditional Korean folktales and songs, thereby creating a uniquely Korean modern poetry free of western modernist influence. It can be said that distancing herself from her native tongue by living in a foreign environment is in itself the poet’s attempt to bring herself closer to the essence of the Korean language. In Heo's poems life is broken into pieces, filled with agony, incoherent, and loveless.

Works in Korean (partial)