WiT Month: Q&A with Don Mee Choi
To celebrate Women in Translation Month this year, we asked some of our favorite translators about decolonization and decentering Europe in translation. First up, the poet and translator Don Mee Choi.
In his essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness”, John Keene wrote: “As part of the panel at which I initially presented this talk, the organizer, Jen Hofer, invited all the panelists to bring an object representative of our translation work”. What object represents your translation work?
Poet Kim Hyesoon gifted me this small hand mirror when I first met her in Seoul, Korea. And I have kept it near me the past nineteen years while translating her poetry.
What is the role of the translator in decolonizing translation? In your regional/linguistic focus(es), are there certain stereotypes or tropes you have to avoid?
My pamphlet published by Ugly Duckling Presse is titled Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode. I also use it in my DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020) to talk about mirror words: “Translation as an anti-neocolonial mode can create other words. I call mine mirror words. Mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance. Mirror words defy neocolonial borders, blockades.”
As Kim Hyesoon often points out, the language of Korean women’s poetry has been prescribed by men, so I avoid translating poets who perpetuate conventionalized “female” language or patriarchal language.
If applicable, how do you approach a work in a colonial language? Should this affect how a translator approaches the work?
Japanese was my father’s colonial language because he grew up during the occupation, and English is my neocolonial language because I grew up in South Korea, which I refer to as neocolony of the US—politically, militarily and economically. In Hardly War and DMZ Colony, I use translation, translingual punning, collages, and reversed words in order to generate mirror words.
In my translation work, I often use translator’s note as a way of establishing literary and political contexts from which the work I translate emerges. I also pay attention to any sounds in Korean words that can be used for translingual punning in my translation. One’s “colonial language” whether Japanese or English, is not always permanent or static. The goal of translation or poetry is to upset the language of power.
Are there any texts not translated by you that you’re excited about right now?
Phone Bells Keep Ringing For Me by Choi Seungja, translated by Won-Chung Kim & Cathy Park Hong, published by Action Book, August 2020.
Katabasis by Lucia Estrada, translated by Olivia Lott, published by Eulalia Books, October 2020.
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II by Peter Weiss, translated by Joel Scott, published by Duke University Press (2020).
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
