Reading & Roundtable on Translation is a Mode=Translation is An Anti-Neocolonial Mode
On Monday, April 12th, 2021, UDP hosted a conversation between writers/translators Mirene Arsanios, Sawako Nakayasu, and Mónica de la Torre on Don Mee Choi’s pamphlet Translation is a Mode=Translation is An Anti-Neocolonial Mode (UDP, 2020). The roundtable was moderated by Esther Allen and sponsored by The Center for the Art of Translation, the CUNY Center for the Humanities, and UDP. It took place virtually and involved an expanded discussion on the authors’ translation practices and complex linguistic-cultural identities.
Mirene Arsanios, Sawako Nakayasu, and Mónica de la Torre’s work, in their own ways, expand, explode, and converse around the act of translation — what it means to translate, to be translated, to be (or not to be) translatable. The authors each chose a section of Choi’s pamphlet to read, and elaborated on the text through the lens of their own translation-based work and methodologies.
To borrow a line from Sawako Nakayasu’s Say Translation Is Art: “Say translation as conversation, as friendship, as intimacy… as generous.” (11). During the course of the conversation, these translators formed a web of friendship and community around their mother/motherless tongues. They reflected on how translation can and should refute, interrogate, and transform the neocolonial apparatus of language itself.
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Mirene Arsanios’s pamphlet Notes On Mother Tongues can be found here
Say Translation Is Art by Sawako Nakayasu can be found here
Don Mee Choi’s pamphlet Translation is a Mode=Translation is An Anti-Neocolonial Mode can be found here
The full set of texts from the 2020 Pamphlet Series can be found here
Esther Allen co-curated, with Allison Markin Powell, Translating the Future, the 2020 online conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the U.S.’s first international literary translation conference. She teaches at Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is working on the 2022 relaunch of the Translation Track of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies.
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing.
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation — separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsum Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color — Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.
Mónica de la Torre’s books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat) and The Happy End/All Welcome (UDP), as well as Public Domain, Talk Shows, and two books in Spanish, Acúfenos and Sociedad Anónima. She is the translator of Defense of the Idol (UDP) by Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres, co-editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon Press), anda member of the editorial board of the Señal series at UDP. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has lived in New York City since the 1990s.
Don Mee Choi, born in Seoul, South Korea, is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books), Hardly War (Wave Books), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books), 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), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
— Noa Mendoza
