'Beginning wherever you wish': Sappho, Homer and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée.

This article analyzes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s avant-garde autobiographical novel *Dictée*, emphasizing its engagement with ancient Greek classics—specifically Sappho, Homer’s *Odyssey*, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—as a key framework for expressing the fragmented, multilingual, and diasporic Korean female experience amid twentieth-century historical trauma. Cha’s work appropriates and subverts these Western canonical texts to articulate themes of migration, war, and intergenerational trauma from a feminist and non-Eurocentric perspective, positioning *Dictée* as both a landmark of Asian American literature and a unique creative response to Greco-Roman antiquity. The text’s nine-part structure, aligned with the Muses of Greek tradition, and its linguistic interplay between English and French, underscore Cha’s complex negotiation of cultural identity and language politics. Ultimately, the article situates *Dictée* within broader transcultural dialogues, illustrating how Cha’s classical references enrich understandings of diasporic subjectivity and challenge conventional readings of Western literary heritage.