10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 11 :: JUSTIN SUN on CHOI SEUNGJA
Week two of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Kate Hedeen and focuses on poetry in translation. Read her curatorial statement here.
When I first read Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong’s translation of “Between Lao-tzu and Chang-tzu,” I messed up. In the poem, by South Korean poet Choi Seungja, the speaker frets over her inability to dance between two Taoist philosophers. She seems to be commenting on the demands of religion, the absurd obfuscation at the heart of mysticism’s authority. And for a variety of incredibly subjective reasons, and because so many of Choi’s other poems left an immediate impression on me, I felt disappointed. But then I read the second stanza:
(I hear two rabbis
pass close and greet each other
in heaven.) (74)
Initially, I read this as “rabbits.” And I was thrilled. The idea of two rabbits greeting each other in heaven struck me as profound — a swift undercut to the religious bind in the preceding stanza. Theories began popping into my head. What radical epistemology, what fresh perspective from this South Korean work-in-translation, could a rabbit contain? I thought about the movie Us. I thought about gavagai and rabbit parts. I considered pulling out my phone and googling “rabbits korea significance.” And then I reread the poem.
The two rabbis in heaven, while certainly a pivot from “the sea of Lao-tzu and Mount Tai of Chang-tzu,” are, frustratingly, not rabbits.
Last Fall, Action Books published a collection of poems from Choi’s long literary career (translated by the aforementioned Kim and Hong) under the name Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me. It is Choi’s first solo appearance for an English-language audience. But unlike its aching speaker, Phone Bells is not alone; the book is just one of many South Korean poetry collections that have landed into English translation in the last couple decades. Spearheaded by a group of dedicated translators — most prominently Don Mee Choi, Jake Levine, Soeun So, and Hedgie Choi — this trend has a strong feminist slant. Almost all of the translated poets are women.
What is interesting to me about these works (aside from how much I like them) is the fact that they hardly reflect the Korean mainstream. Choi, along with Kim Hyesoon, has experienced her share of renown in her home country, but the two are by no means establishment poets. The Korean literary world continues to be a patriarchal space hostile to feminism, and the translated poets themselves are some of the first people to name that (Kim, “Kim Hyesoon”; Kim, “I’ll Do What I Want”). Kim Yideum, another Korean poet who has experienced success in English translation, speaks acerbically of the mundan, the Korean literary scene (Kim, “Kim Yideum”).
So instead, what I and many inexpert English readers like me encounter as “Korean” poetry is more like an avant-garde strand in that country. A strand with close ties. Choi and Kim Hyesoon are contemporaries. When Choi’s mental health prevented her from working, Kim rallied a group of poets to help her. Both Choi and Kim’s poetics have echoes in that of Kim Yideum as well as Kim Min Jeong and Moon Bo Young, two poets who are part of Black Ocean’s new Moon Country translation series. While many of the traditional Korean literary establishment shun them, and while their styles certainly vary in key ways, these poets all know and respect each other’s work.
According to translator Jake Levine, the modern Korean canon consists of “two pillars”: nature poetry and political poetry (Levine “Idle or Charged”). The beautiful and the brave.
In “Toward You,” Choi Seungja writes,
Like flowing water,
I will come to you.
Like alcohol dissolving in water,
like nicotine congealing in alcohol,
like caffeine coating nicotine,
I will come to you.
Like syphilis germs flowing through veins,
like death gripping life. (12)
I especially enjoy those last two lines — an encore of the abject.
That the radical should find its way into translation is not a novel idea; it is, I think, a happy occurrence. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak advocates for just such a thing (320). And that many readers will persist in interpreting these works as metonyms of Korea, despite the contextualizing information provided in translator’s notes and interviews, is ultimately not surprising.[1] But it is worth noting because it is everywhere, and because I know I do it too.
The ways that such readings appear are varied. There are the reviews that ask “And what of Korea is there for us to learn from this book?” (Loudon) or “Was I certain, when reading these poems, that they were Korean?” (Reeck).[2] But there are also the subtler forms, like those that use the works to talk about Korea’s history or its current state of hypercapitalism (Disney) — helpful background knowledge, sure, but not ontologies in and of themselves. The irony here is that even when I am aware of these poets’ antagonism to the Korean mainstream, I will still use that dialectical to explain the country as a whole.
While reading the line “(Do they say Kaku Karak for Coca-cola?)” (Choi 78), I paused. I thought about a K-drama I had just finished. In it, the protagonist is a glamorous fashion mogul who goes hang gliding one day and gets caught in a freak tornado. She somehow survives and is carried into North Korea, where she eventually finds the small joys in life. And love.
I ask myself, And what of Korea is there to learn from this?
Boiled down, there were two things that inspired me to write this reflection: 1) an invitation from Katherine Hedeen to write about Choi, which had the perhaps intended effect of making me dig deeper into her work, and 2) a tweet from the translator and poet Don Mee Choi. In response to another poet’s wondering if Kim Hyesoon could be labeled as “speculative poetry,” Don Mee Choi elaborated:
My questioning is fundamental. Who gets to theorize? What gets to be recognized as knowledge? Who/what gets to be the fodder for theory? @PoetKimHyesoon has written and already theorized her own writing and her feminist literary practice and lineage for years.
There is a point when theorizing goes from engaged reading to a potential overstep — when I am
no longer facilitating comprehension but ignoring the labor, expertise, and perspective of an entire
literary terrain. And it seems that in the world of translation, that line is easy to cross. Even with
the aid of paratext, literature in English translation, presented as it so often is — as self-contained
foreign works — almost always comes to the reader extracted from the depths of its context. And
almost always within the expectation of consumption.
Here is a key fragment, it says.
Eat it. Digest it whole.
There is a long history in the U.S. of treating the foreign as something to be subsumed, something
to be bound and controlled.
But Don Mee Choi’s question points to another way we flatten literature in translation: To categorize Kim Hyesoon as “speculative poetry” is a move that at its heart aims to highlight her work’s radical nature, though on some level may have the opposite effect. For readers that understand translation as something that “infects,” that see its marginality and distortions as a site of resistance, there is certainly a desire to name that phenomena. Such frameworks have helped me put words to my experiences, and have perhaps further unlocked those forces within my reading. But I have to wonder if in its own way a framework can also blind. I go into my reading looking for confirmation — not of “Korean-ness,” but of something else, something perhaps antithetical yet just as restrictively defined — and when you know what you are looking for, it is hard to find anything else.
I am way too inexperienced to confidently launch any sort of critique here. These categorizations and theories are often important work. Instead, I will leave it to Kim Hyesoon’s own words (translated by Song Gyu Han): Speaking on her publications as a scholar and literary critic, Kim says,
I do not know whether these works helped my poetry. Specifically, I think the self who writes poetry is different from the self who makes a claim about abolishing the wage differences between men and women. Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world. (“Kim Hyesoon”)
Kim Hyesoon, like so many poets, chooses poetry as a medium because she can use it to stretch, subvert, and mock the limits of language. For her specifically (though not uniquely) the action is political, attacking a structure that has been defined and re-defined by patriarchal and colonial power. To then retroactively encapsulate, or re-translate, that work into the language of criticism, which typically obeys the norms of grammar, style, and diction, is in some sense a self-defeating act.
In Bakhtinian terms, poetry is the carnival and criticism is the state.
In creative-writing-workshop terms, to tell someone they are infected is much less effective than to simply infect them.
(I hear two rabbis
pass close and greet each other
in heaven.)
My disappointment in the first stanza of “Between Lao-tzu and Chang-tzu” had everything to do with my private expectations. I wanted an explosion of East Asian mysticism, not a confused, frozen dance.
I’m not sure how much this says about critical activity. I am sure that it says a lot about my personal crusade against orientalism — and even more about my novice’s need to feel smart-smart-smart. I narrow my eyes at the reviewers who think “foreign” poetry must offer us ethnography, but isn’t expecting an infection just a different side of that same coin? In other words, at what point does a virus become an import?
When you are looking for rabbits, it is hard to find anything else.
Choi Seungja, though I have so far digressed from her work, has helped me see this point. The experience of reading many of these Korean works-in-translation is to repeatedly ask oneself, “What the fuck is going on?” It is why I love them; why they re-energized my interest in poetry. But such destabilization engenders a need to explain. And even with a focus on submitting to uncertainty, any theory is an attempt to find some footing.
Choi’s poetics, on the other hand, exists on the ground, in the familiar and the corporeal. It is starkly direct; her imagery is vicious:
The world monopolized by wind —
a fleet of strong wind,
a school of blue-backed, man-eating sharks. (45)
The pain in her metaphors is hard to miss:
That I am alive
is no more than an endless
rumor. (9)
You should hang this life’s wet shadow up to dry,
while there’s still enough sun. (50)
And her lines, when needed, are allergic to figurative meaning:
From the beginning,
my life has been a waste. (58)
I have to applaud Kim and Hong for the crispness of these translations. There were times in my reading that I wondered how much sorrow I could stomach, if Choi’s avalanche of loss and regret was not overkill. But that is kind of the point. Choi stares at the solar eclipse of her life, pupils dilated, eyes melting, until you finally look at it too.
Where the experimentalism of others can begin to feel heady, Choi will hit you in your bones. Kim Min Jeong, a professed fan, said, “Choi Seung-ja writes first with the fire of her body before she starts to calculate in her mind” (Kim, “I’ll Do What I Want”). I am hypothesizing here, but I imagine that a Kim Hyesoon or Kim Yideum or Moon Bo Young poem might say, Rabbits? Sure, why not. But also rabbit guts, and maybe laughing uncle, and maybe maybe mother-excrement-God. Whereas Choi Seungja simply says, No, not rabbits. Rabbis. Stop this you nerd. Feel it.
Do we need a neologism for that?
All this being said, I know there is an ecosystem. My interest in translation has been sharpened by the many incisive theories I’ve read. And it is the sense that these “foreign” works are transformative that, while sometimes constraining, is still at the core of translation’s appeal. There is an energy and brilliance in the translation community that in part comes from the fact that translation is sidelined by existing power structures, and that its practitioners are aware of how much it can dismantle. In this sense, translation feeds off its ties to a discontent with the mainstream.
I think back to Phone Bells. Not the words inside, but the materiality of it. Its brisk size. The sole picture of Choi on its cover: smoldering cigarette, gaunt cheeks, aching eyes. Like a nihilistic auntie who comforts you through a breakup by telling you about her past twelve (a far cry from my actual auntie who sends me frequent pictures of her adorable pit bull named Moo). Looking out at the potential buyer, Choi seems to say, I know what you want, you disaffected hipster. Open me. Read me.
And by and large, this extends to most poetry-in-translation: books are a material commodity, and the designers of translations must know their place in the market. Whether it’s as a mind-opening piece of “World Literature” or a distilled essence of foreign cool or even a work of resistance, publishers understand the expectations of their audience, and they frequently capitalize on it. Translation cannot infect if there are no available hosts.
But it is important to also let poetry be poetry. Translation is already marginalized in the English market; it only helps so much to play into that further. While labels and categories are illuminating, we should remember, as Don Mee Choi points out, which works we feel the need to apply them to, and who gets to do the applying. I am reminded of all the ways that literature within the English language that is from marginalized perspectives is dismissed: ethnic literature, protest literature, queer literature, etc. — all broadly lumped together, all with a single accompanying lens for reading. There is an absurd distinction between reading to learn about someone else and reading to learn about yourself. And it is when that distinction is made, as it has been throughout the history of power, that those who control “knowing” will eventually come to know the least.
The poem “Poetry, or Charting a Way” hints at Choi’s own relationship to writing. In it, the speaker says,
Charting a way
and leaving a trace of the way,
I wish that this way will meet other ways,
and not go too far alone.
I wish someone would follow
close enough that I don’t feel lonely. (46)
As an American reader, I want to compare Choi to someone like Emily Dickinson. Not for their poetics, but for their loneliness. Across ages and across continents, writing has been a final recourse for the isolated — an ear that, if one is optimistic enough, might finally hear you — and yet I tend to forget this dimension when I’m reading. Literature, and especially poetry, can be a fallible yet remarkable attempt to supersede the reifications of discourse and region and time. So if I ever do get over my drive to schematize everything (and who’s to say I will reach that goal!), I might finally, productively dissolve. And maybe then, once I am porous, Choi Seungja will feel less alone.
But for the moment, I will make do with empathy. Choi’s poems, unflinching in tone, exacting in pain, have been a comfort to me this pandemic winter. On the mornings when I don’t want to rise from bed into my tiny, frigid room, when I don’t want to repeat the same ten hours in front of a screen, when I consider the untouchable vastness of this city around me, I let myself indulge. The solidarity of another’s longing. The unexceptional isolation of this bizarre life.
My favorite stanza in all of Phone Bells comes in the poem “The End of a Century.” Choi’s speaker is miserable, as she is wont to be, yet she is embarrassed by her sentiment’s banality, and she is humiliated to by her embarrassment’s inefficacy; and so, with nothing else to do, she stretches these feelings, on and on and on, until she has a poem, one that she then hands to the reader — plop — with a sigh and wink. She writes,
I wish I had a friend
to beat me like a dog
when I get upset.
Oh, I wish I’d become a dog, beaten to death.
I’d like to become a carpet made of the skin of a dog
beaten to death. In the twenty-first century,
I’d like to be a rag, trodden by your feet.
(Please trod on me softly). (67)
[1] It is also important to note that only certain regions of the world receive this treatment, typically those with a history of colonial and neocolonial domination. I am reminded of the teams of orientalists that have been employed to “understand” places like Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
[2] Reeck inserts this comment after acknowledging the expectation for foreign literature to serve as ethnography, though for some reason he seems to reach the conclusion that literature in translation must contort to fit this demand.
Justin Sun is from San Jose, CA. He lives in Chicago.
