WiT Month: Q&A with Mui Poopoksakul
To celebrate Women in Translation Month this year, we asked some of our favorite translators about decolonization and decentering Europe in translation. Mui Poopoksakul, a lawyer turned translator, answered some questions for the series.
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?
When you translate from a non-Western language or translate non-Western literature, you are of course helping to counter eurocentrism by making the works you translate accessible and drawing interest to them, in hopes that what is considered canonical or worthwhile of study or enjoyment around the world will become more diverse and less Western-dominant. But for me, I think it’s not specifically about decolonizing translation but about decolonizing narratives more generally. Thai writers and writers from many, many countries are still rarely read beyond their own borders, and one of the effects that has is stories about such places—which globally tend to contain a Western gaze—become simplified and fixed. With local authors writing for an audience of their own compatriots, what emerges is more complicated, more nuanced because writers can bank on shared references (one of the things that makes translation so hard), and there isn’t the same desire to converge on a coherent, easy story for the country or the society. It’s immensely difficult to understand a faraway place. Though I am Thai, I’ve spent far more or my life outside the country, and I hardly feel equipped to speak about Thailand sometimes. I’m probably in communication with at least one Thai person in Thailand every day, but I feel like I’m always catching up and fighting the urge to read about Thailand in foreign papers, which often put stories in such neat, digestible packages. We translators have biases, too, and I’m trying to be more aware of when and how much my thinking is molded by the West.
With works from Southeast Asia, one is concerned about perpetuating stereotypes of exoticness and backwardness. Thailand is now an upper-middle income country—with all the good and bad that such rapid economic development entails—but the image of the country as a poor, third-world nation of lush jungles and where all women can cook wonderful, fragrant food still lingers in the Western imagination. When I was in middle school in the U.S., for example, I had classmates ask me if I used to ride an elephant to school. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My middle-school days are long behind me (that was the early 90s), but often enough I still pick up similar tendencies in Westerners’ perception when they ask me about Thailand. If you’re reading this, I’m probably preaching to the converted, but yes, I do worry that it’s that stuck-in-time Thailand, with all of the imagined exoticness, that people are seeking when they read a Thai book, and when your impression of a place is that it’s behind the times, it becomes harder to imagine that anything artistically avant-garde or even contemporary will come from there.
In your regional/linguistic focus(es), what is the role of work by women or other underrepresented literary figures in destabilizing colonial narratives?
As I found out for myself recently, this destabilization can come up in quite unexpected ways. I just had an eye-opening conversation with the Isan (northeastern Thai) writer Phu Kradat (his last name has sometimes been spelled in English as Kradart or Kra-dart) about his forthcoming novel 24/7-1. While giving him comments on his manuscript, I asked him why he chose to italicize Isan words (Isan is considered a dialect of Thai but spoken Isan is closer to Laotian) and suggested that this was worth rethinking because in some chapters there were a lot of them, some of which readers of standard Thai, like me, can understand. His answer was that he wanted to highlight the extent to which Isan is snubbed as foreign or other to standard-Thai speakers, while English loan words are so eagerly adopted into the speech of Bangkok-Thai speakers, such that people forget or nearly forget that those words are in fact foreign. He didn’t italicize English loan words in the novel, and I must admit I did not even notice, and even worse, after our conversation, I went back and scanned the first part of the novel again, and only then did I realize that he intentionally dropped in so many English words. The fact that this passed me by completely proves his point about what we—the speakers of standard Thai and arbiters of the country’s dominant culture—valorize and devalorize. I’m not sure I’m yet able to articulate an answer that gives more of an overview with regards to this question, but my recent experience with Phu has really put me on notice to look for more of these instances.
Are there any texts not translated by you that you’re excited about right now?
At the moment I’m reading Juan Pablo Villalobos’s I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me. The translation is incredibly taut and delivers the humor so well. I picked up the book after coming across Daniel Hahn’s interview about the novel’s different voices and wanted to study that aspect of his translation (though now I’m just reading it for fun). I haven’t finished the book yet, but my favorite parts so far are the epistolary chapters in the protagonist’s mother’s voice. She refers to herself in her letters to her son as “your mother” and “she”/“her” in a way that still feels first person. I think this could work well for the way certain Thai parents talk, especially as the words “mother” and “father” can function as first-person pronouns in Thai. I might have to borrow this one in the future!
Also, pre-pandemic, I’d been planning a trip to Japan, which somehow must have put me on a mini Japanese streak. I really enjoyed Convenience Store Woman by Sakaya Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori) for its bluntness, and Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko (tr. Polly Barton) because I’m interested in the idea of ghost stories giving expression to our unconscious. This book puts a modern spin on that and is full of surprises.
In your linguistic focus(es), what is your favorite untranslatable word and, as best you can describe, what does it mean?
Thai has the word “mun kiew” (มันเขี้ยว), which describes the emotional state of wanting to squeeze or pinch or bite something because it’s so cute. In English, there’s apparently a newish scientific term for this phenomenon—“cute aggression” (read about it here), but in Thai “mun kiew” is an everyday word, so it sounds a lot less crazy than saying, “I want to cute-aggress that thing!”
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?
Maybe a serving platter, because I’m working with something already made that I’m re-plating, and also I think translation is at least in part fundamentally about sharing.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press, and of Duanwad Pimwana’s Arid Dreams (Feminist Press) and Bright (Two Lines Press). The Sad Part Was was shortlisted for the UK Translators’ Association First Translation Prize, and her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Two Lines, Asymptote, The Quarterly Conversation, and In Other Words. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the US, she now lives in Berlin.
