Mapping Modes of Allegiance: The Radical Translations of Don Mee Choi
DMZ Colony. Seattle: Wave Books, April 2020. $20.00
Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, Ugly Duckling Presse, May 2020. 21 pages. $12.00
* * * * *
[Text, Subject]
I meet Don Mee Choi on the sky’s page, in a space of radical longing which doesn’t seek to restore the past so much as imagine a habitable future. [*] I say meet rather than met because I am still meeting, reading, and re-visiting the text. Since Choi’s sense of time is an ongoing present that enacts presence, this meeting now occupies its own map, structured by that of the conventional book review. To the extent that her work challenges all static maps and formulas, I am tempted to internalize her work as a translation surface, to make use of this mirror that reflects the self back and changes the map in the process. This deserves explanation.
[Pamphlet, Intertextuality]
Intertextuality, or the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, widens a poem’s perspective while changing time’s relation to the page. For Don Mee Choi, intertextual reference is crucial to her theory of translation, which follows Walter Benjamin understanding of translation as a mode.
Benjamin’s linguistic theory defines language as “all communication of mental meanings” not just those limited to text [1]. Choi’s translations occur across an expansive idea of language which includes photos, maps, notes, human gestures, bodies, birds, latitudes, even the mental state of longing. She makes this explicit in in the pamphlet, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti- neocolonial Mode:
I translate this longing, entangled with neocolonial dependency, as homesickness, which is a form of illness, a form of intensity.
This longing inflects her recent poetry collection, DMZ Colony, the second book in a trilogy on neocolonial spaces, the first being Hardly War (2016), and the final being the work-in-progress that explores the event which caused her family to leave South Korea, namely, the Gwangju commune’s pro-democracy brutal suppression by US-backed Korean forces in May 1980. This trilogy is connected by translation mode’s relation to longing, a use of the page as field, and a particular way of looking at time.
[All Texts, Longing]
What does it mean to translate longing into a form of illness? The history of homesickness, like nostalgia, begins with medical diagnoses and an obsessive relationship to memory, or the memories of a particular place, often corresponding with a childhood [2]. I think Choi’s translation of longing mimics the hunger of language to be understood, to be known, to be placed. But longing is less particular than homesickness, which is rooted in remembered experience.
Longing’s relationship to place aims for the inaccessible space, in the imagining of what does not exist or can no longer exist. Longing’s motion is recursive, repetitive, and oriented towards the future-present as something one wants or desires. Longing reaches towards stability and gets bored. Longing cannot settle with a place that has existed — it does not aim to restore so much as to revisit through recreation.
My understanding of longing as a creative rather than restorative influences the way I read our desire for certainty, a stagnant state. The 20th century reveals the cost of governments weaponizing nostalgia into political nationalism; this cost comes from the state’s power to define identity, and to promise security through militarism [3]. What I mean is that what you want from this essay may be the thing it should never give you.
[Poetry Collection, Sky Translation]
DMZ Colony is divided into eight sections, not including the Endnotes [4]. By alternating between various defamiliarizing forms, including bricolage and montage, Choi foregrounds memory as language which communicates through unsettled gaze. The material text’s complexity underscores the role of re-collection: fragments, images, photos, unusual typography, destabilizing deployment of punctuation, archived documents, and objects which reflect us back. Visual pieces, notes, scribbles, maps, marginalia, emotions all enter the book as language forms deserving translation.
The translation of longing conspires with all language to instruct the poet: she must return and translate Korea. The sky, itself, serves as a found text in the first section, “Sky Translation,” which establishes the Choi’s relationship to place, and the significance of wings as a theme and mode. Place, itself, it inaccessible:
The Korean Demilitarized Zone is approximately 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. The DMZ Zone runs across the 38th parallel, a division created after World War II, with the end of the 35-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea. The US occupied the South, and the Soviet Union the North.
The DMZ runs along the same latitude as St. Louis. This latitude is added to the page (38.648056 north) as part of the translation. Choi accesses the inaccessible from Missouri, seeking a route across the colonized question from inside the great colonialist. This route arrives in the language of flock calls from migrating snow geese on a route aligned with the 38th parallel. The formal use of ellipses as open gestures appears when the geese “instruct” Choi in a poem that incants the word return eighteen times: “… return … return … return … return … return .. .return …”
On the verso, the incantation is clarified with “a little line” dropped from the sky: “SEE YOU AT DMZ”. The translated message from geese sits alone in open space as an all-caps translation [5], above a statement from the translator at the bottom of the page:
Alone again, I could only chirp to myself. Translator for hire! Hire, hire me.
“Hire” is kin to “higher” when spoken aloud. I heard in this homophone the instability of language, how it means one thing and then another, how it moves to mean what we make of it. Perhaps the homophone also references a certain twinnedness residing in words [6]. One senses the influence of Charles Olson’s “projective verse,” a practice that shifts attention from narrativity and temporality towards embodiment or metonymic mapping, thus granting sight and sound equal status on the linguistic field of the poem.
[Pamphlet, Theory of Translation]
In the pamphlet, Choi describes how she became a “foreigner,” or a stranger to the mothered self, a motherless child, after her family fled Park Chung-hee’s US-supported dictatorship:
As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility — a mirror image of myself. I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse in order to map the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.
To translate herself, she takes translation as an “anti-neocolonial mode” that reconfigures the landscape and language in its re-presentation. Because this mode is critical to her poetics, I want to spend time unpacking it.
A mode is defined as a way or manner in which something occurs or is experienced, expressed, or done. As a mode rather than an endpoint which aims to match an original, to create a finished product, translation is unstable. Borrowing from Joyelle McSweeney’s and Johannes Göransson’s idea of translation as a “deformation zone,” Choi focuses on the deformity, the wound of dislocation, as a generative space for connecting across languages, borders, and culture. Choi describes her tongue as “an aggregate, a site of multiple and collective enunciation.” As is yours. As is any language. Perhaps Choi wants us to see how this is true of English as well–how translating from Korean to English changes one mode of colonialism for the particular raiments of another [7].
Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence (1963) inspires Choi’s understanding of mirrors as sites of translation which include multiple reflections, languages, gestures, and interpretations. A mirror is “a site where things are already mirrored, re-represented.” Choi credits Kim Hyesoon, whose work she translates, with creating mirrors that serve as “translation surfaces”:
“… they house mothers with motherless tongues, making endless crossings from one generation to another, from woman to woman, from language to language, creating what Benjamin calls an “embryonic or intensive form.”
There is a sense in which translation becomes a mothered space, a place of re-union, as well as a space in which the twinned self can exist. But re-union should not be mistaken for unity, or wholeness. To explain why, I looked to Choi’s influences, specifically, Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” which posits a temporal shift that makes translation “from the original” impossible. The translator isn’t translating from the “life” of the original text but from “its afterlife,” a later. As a result, the translator is responsible for watching over “the maturing process of the original language” as well as the “birth pangs” of the new language. Benjamin assumes a kinship between languages as means of communication, and it is this kinship which widens the space of belonging and community something greater than our ascribed belongings, something kinning the near-cosmic [8].
Let’s go to Berlin, where Choi is speaking to E. Tammy Kim, and describing the resonance of the fallen Berlin wall: “I felt strongly when I first came to see the remnants of the wall.” For Choi, re-union signifies as both temporal and spatial, in her words “this is the future, not the past, the future of the Koreas.” [9] Benjamin’s “afterlife” of a text includes its translated beings, its hybrids, its dislocated inhabitants, its alienated residents. And the re-union is not the same as the union; the event which caused the initial rupture can never be erased. As such, the re-union itself must reflect the influence of time, and accept that the original can never be translated or returned.
To illustrate this, Benjamin offers a metaphor that hinges on the difference between a skin and a robe. In the original untranslated version, language and content exist in unity “like a fruit and its skin” whereas the translated version lays over the original like “a royal robe with ample folds.” This robe creates a disjunction between form and content that makes translation “overpowering” and “alien.” [10]
There is a parallel between the experience of existing outside one’s country of origin and translating from one’s displaced mother tongue; in both cases, the content of personhood is covered by an overpowering robe. For immigrants, this often means that the robe, or the translated version, is the only part people notice [11]. By setting the original text alongside the displaced translation, Choi works along the contemporary grain of textual multilingualism. Voice exists as a hybrid corpus, faithful to its multiple forms across language and dialect. The body, itself, is a translated being, defined by intertextuality. By which I mean: I cannot separate the child left by parents in Romania from the adult writing this essay.
Perhaps I mean: because the DMZ remains inaccessible, the DMZ must be speculative. And because the DMZ must be speculative as text, the translation must be faithful to its imagining rather than the original provided by North and South Korean officials.
[Poetry Collection, Wings of Return]
Memory’s name. Memory’s child. My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born, where my retina and my father’s overlap.
In the “Wings of Return” section of DMZ Colony, the poet re-visions the borders of place in order to enter history, using her father’s journalistic photos to re-member or inhabit General Park Chung-Hee’s declaration of martial law in South Korea. What Choi remembers is laid alongside his father’s.
“Overlapping memory always longs for return, the return of memory,” writes Choi. But memory cannot return to the original site of meaning. It can only return to its after-image, the image displaced from the original (i.e. the repetition of the word foreign).
We travel to South Korea in 2016, where the poet returned “in the guise of a translator, which is to say, I returned as a foreigner.” On this journey, Choi translates the testimony of Ahn Hak-sop who was a political prisoner from 1953 to 1995, and who remains a fervent supporter of the North Korean government [12]. Ellipses are used to separate the fragments in Hak-sop’s statement:
Don’t be a fool … just admit that you are a party member … but I was just a foot soldier … in 1954 … I had a trial and was sent to a military prison … if you didn’t bleed for a day then you had your ancestors to thank for it …
Pages alternate between his testimony and Choi’s ongoing translation which includes descriptive notes, fragments, key words “impossibly coded.” The translation mode stretches, changes stride to suit the fruit.
[Pamphlet, Citizened Syntax]
I come from a land where we are taught that the US saved us from Commies and that North Korea is our enemy. I come from a land of neocolonial fratricide. I come from such twoness.
This two-ness is referenced again and again; here, in the pamphlet where Choi expounds on multiple myths of origin. And isn’t where are you from the heaviest question? [13] To answer this question is to answer inside the echoes of a demand for allegiance.
But what exists also resists this, since Don Mee Choi was born in a country that no longer exists, a united Korea. According to official documents, she is from one half of that birth, namely, South Korea. Her place of birth does not match her place of origins on the current maps. Like other immigrants, she married into the absence of an American tongue.
Holding one’s native language as constituent is challenging when one marries into love that cannot speak it, understand it, or re-collect it. This insecurity or feeling of not quite belonging to one’s mother tongue comes out in Choi’s conversation with E. Tammy Kim, where Choi says: “I’m not good at Korean … I don’t know why I hang on to it as if it’s my native … OK, it is.” Yet, note the ellipses after native … and what does it mean to write from a transplanted native tongue that is also tangled by neocolonialism? Isn’t our story of origins also a narrative of guilt by association?
Isn’t citizenship a language inscribed on the bodies and revisited by the mode of translation? [14] Choi, herself, is translated by American citizenship. Her poetic practice works against citizened “order-words” by crossing them figuratively and textually, through translation, which is a “map, a mode that can trigger endless crossings from one party to another.” But it also works by association, where Choi’s associative syntax mobilizes open space to reveal the gap between words and meaning without stitching it shut. The wound stays open. As forms of punctuation, Choi’s use of ellipses connects words and fragments without closing or resolving them. In dialogue with herself and its translations, Choi’s search for a re-unification (that is not quite re-union) with the twinned.
[Poetry Collection, Planetary Translations]
The section “Planetary Translations” takes us to Marfa, Texas, where we see the travesty of US policy against Latinx migrants and refugees. We also learn that Ahn-Kim’s findings about the abuses perpetrated by the South Korean government will not be made public [15]. Choi leaves us with the silence or absence of these findings in tracings of her scribbles, in spirals and swirls that circle around the continuing silence.
[Poetry Collection, Interpellation of Return]
In the section “Interpellation of Return,” we see how language creates the invisible maps that divide humans by designating them. Two pages from the Counterintel Corps of South Korea’s 1951 record of the Samcheong-Hamyang Massacre are replicated without translation. The section is framed by Lewis Althusser’s description of ideology as that which recruits or transforms individuals into subjects through the act of ‘hailing,” or interpellation, a form of address that replaces an individual name with a category.
The “Hey You” serves as a means of concealment, a “nondifferentiation” among the victims of the massacres which maintains a good/bad binary, allowing the South Korean leaders to establish their authority through innocence. “Escape and exile must be differentiated,” Choi says:
The Victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners of memory are also. We live as foreigners, as translators. We translate everything … We see the point of rescribing everything written upon the bodies.
Since the victims of the Samcheong-Massacre cannot be counted, they must be “recounted though memory,” which takes the form of “bricolage”, an assembly imagined “through the ‘hailing’ of return.” Different ways of leaving require different ways of return, and the mode of translation applies to all [16].
[Poetry Collection, The Apparatus]
Language, whether pledge or poetry, has the ability to put “things of the mind in common,” to quote Dan Beachy-Quick. “Poetry uses a word so that it troubles the boundary between within and without, disloyal border guard, insisting on trespass” [17]. Choi’s trespass is both formal and temporal. Choi subverts the fulcrum’s traditional relationship to a part of the poem by making each word a fulcrum which radically reorients the reader’s relationship to language.
We see this in “The Apparatus” section, where one encounters a processing machine so massive that one doesn’t delineate its space of operation. It is everywhere and accountable to none. Using the form of a theatre script, Choi recreates a dialogue between two places: Frank Kafka’s Penal Colony and the Neocolony. The bureaucratic spaces are the characters; their primary concern is with exclusion, which is determined by obsession with consistency and recitation of order-words. The Neocolony corresponds to the INS, the former state organ that awarded “naturalization” and citizenship.
In the Penal Colony: (The batons energized by muscles alone lack the technology and sophistication of the Harrow but nonetheless they should be understood as instruments of writing) “the translator”
The syntax is brisk, divided, repetitive, layering quotations inside parentheses, moving between the bounded spaces of punctuation and officialese, the effect is bewildering. What does the subject of Penal or Neocolony say?
(chorus of allegiance: EVER, EVER, EVER)
- Eternity
- Eternity
- Eternity
Words are sites of violence. In his “Notes on Violence,” Walter Benjamin ends by condemning not just militarism, or the “universal use of violence as a means to the end of the state,” but also the “administrative violence” which makes nationalism’s murdering and erasure possible [18]. I thought of how Choi’s translation reveals the machine’s hinges. since it is language that permits and enables domination. The language of permits, visas, passports, and permissions is the verbiage of domination. The first and last time I said the pledge of allegiance was at my naturalization ceremony. How am I translated through it’s recitation?
[Poetry Collection, Mirror Words]
In the Berlin conversation with E. Tammy Kim, Choi says: “I think US nationalism is very strong and powerful, and people are really blind to it.” She expounds on this in the “Mirror Words” section of DMZ Colony, which begins by presenting an alternative to order words:
Order words compel division, war, and obedience around the world. But other worlds are possible. Translation as an anti-colonial mode can create other worlds. I call mine mirror words. Mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance.
Intertextuality enacts the ability of mirror words to change vision through the mode of translation, the process of continual reflecting, revealing, and revisioning. The process is not separate from the longing, as Choi makes clear a few lines later:
Mirror words are homesick. Mirror words are halo. Mirror words are orphaned words. Now look at your words in a mirror. Translate, translate! Did you? Do it again, do it!
This imperative touched me deeply, like a word kinned to wound, unspeakable. Choi’s mirror words cannot settle or rest in finality; they are unsettled words which challenge the neocolony’s controlling words. This mode is juxtaposed against the officialese of “Your Excellency,” a letter dated from 1979 noting the lack of available translators for foreign correspondence (set on the left page):
The members of your cabinet may not have any tolerance for foreign words or incomprehensibility in general. And the photography is of an event in the near past or future. Time is irrelevant, time is miniscule.
We see how controlling time and meaning is critical to the neocolonial mindset, and this control is enacted through through language. Set on the right page, in response, Choi juxtaposes photos of a student in the moments before he was beaten at a 1980 protest with unclear expressions of jibberish as captions, thus enacting disorder through mirrored words.
In the US, the connection between imperialism and nationalism is obscured by ritual: our participation blinders us to the strangeness of flags-folding regimes, national hymns, and various socializations which enforce a shared response to patriotic signifiers [19]. In serving as a translator for South Korean feminist activists opposing militarism and US neo- colonialism, Choi finds all languages are touched by colonization, all languages altered by their relationship to power and violence in history.
Translation is part of this resistance to nationalism, as when Choi says she is not “content to just translate from Korean to English” which upholds “the notion of national literature — the notion that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders.” She explains how the Korean vernacular script, hangul, was constructed by Korean leaders to help upper classes pronounce Chinese characters in a way that excluded women. The vernacular wasn’t a neutral event: it was a resignifying event in which power was shifted and rendered more exclusive through access to text. As Benjamin theorizes, the mode of translation is a motion “through a continuum of transformations” rather than “abstract areas of identity and similarity” as given by nations [20].
[Poetry Collection, The Orphans]
But translation as a mode must include the young Choi, must read across maps, and time, in dialogue with both self, family, nation, and history [21].
In “The Orphans” section, Choi offers a series of persona poems written from the perspective of children orphaned by the Korean War. The original text handwritten by the orphans faces Choi’s translation into English on the adjacent page. The distance between the translations is a DMZ zone of sorts, a space demarcated by its opposites in language. Each poem is titled after the child’s name, prefaced by “Orphan.” The poem “Orphan Kim Gap-sun,” notes his age as 8 just beneath the title [1]. What follows is a list form playing on the indictment of the word “communist.” Beginning with “commie grandma,” the indictment scrolls down the page, ending:
commie nephews
commie baby
commie friend
we are all commie bastards
The orphan is thus defined by the insults of others, by the affiliations of family members with whom he lacks contact. This feels intimate whenever I read another scathing US media take on the Romanian orphanages, where Romanian mothers are dehumanized for giving up children in a country where abortion was considered a crime against the state [22].
In the Endnotes, Choi says she wrote the orphan story-poems herself in Korean, based on what Ahn-Kim told her at their 2016 meeting, and that this pain of separation and loss is another structural component of memory’s need. I felt Choi was doing something incredible in bringing herself forward as an orphan, in using her own “childish handwriting” to cross the line of permissible documentation. She notes the translations aren’t identical, as they can’t be, for “there are always two of us — the eternal twoness.” She speaks for the orphans and then translates across the two-ness.
This is necessary. This is part of her project, as laid out in the earlier poetry collection, Hardly War, where the first poem is titled “Race=Nation,” and where Choi explains:
In reality, we were all angels … orphans who aren’t orphans. Angels who aren’t angels.
We are all creatures who make use of language which “contains its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity” wherein “its linguistic being, not its verbal meanings, defines its frontiers.” The language of angels must be translated alongside the archived documents of human events. [23]
[Poetry Collection, (Neo) (=) (Angels)]
Choi translates the angels, orphans, and things including her father’s family photos, in the DMZ Colony‘s final section, “(Neo) (=) (Angels).” This section consists entirely of captioned photos describing her family’s life in South Korea. (To quote Benjamin, again: “The translation of the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into name.”)
The photos are translated in captions, but they are translated again in the Endnotes, where Choi supplements and debstabilizes the work done by captions, noting, for example, that her father “always questioned his identity” since his birthdate was not recorded until “he was old enough to question his existence.” From the Endnotes, we learn that her father’s mentor manipulated the photo of a Korean winner at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to erase the Japanese flag from his shirt. In the same note, Choi defines montage as “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots” [24].
Let us return to Berlin, where Wim Wenders’ film, Wings of Desire (1987) invented its own creatures in order to approach longing. And perhaps we want our longing to be winged by lyric, a trapeze artist. We want longing’s wings to touch shorelines without running into barbed wire or fences. We want to imagine that Wenders wasn’t trying to unpack a wall inside a country, a division within Berlin. It is the angels and winged creatures who have the greatest insight into what happens, Wenders suggests.
Is it strange that I imagined Benjamin’s angel connecting to Don Mee Choi across the silence of the DMZ as she wrote this terrifying, beautiful book? Is it estrangered that his absence illumes the present at levels of theory and longing which are not separate from one another?
[All texts, Epistemology]
There is a paradox in the way translating across borders challenges time while relying on memory. I am reminded of Svetlana Boym’s attempt to revisit the refugee camp where she lived after escaping the Soviet Union [25]. It was a world of its own nestled in the suburbs of Vienna, and yet lacking a porous border. Boym can’t find it on maps or in historical records. The space where she existed as in-between does not exist outside the re-creation of the after-image in the memories of others who lived there.
The hybrid, multiply-hyphenated being cannot choose a side in the binaries of identity. Those who would have us make such a choice misunderstand the nature of the wound, it’s interior divisions. The critical eye of the displaced is vulnerable to longing, and its promise of belonging granted to those who say the right thing or repeat the dominant narrative. But the critical eye must remain unsettled, untethered to the goals of the state, in order to “open up the dimension of difference and the space for independent judging and imagination,” as Boym says. The tension between the hope of belonging cannot be satisfied without extinguishing the hope for a future that transcends neocolonial borders and order words whose power derives from the ability to determine, divide, and destroy based on constructs of allegiance, therein replicating the violence of maps on the interior spaces of personhood.
Does it matter that Walter Benjamin’s Reflections has the image of a blue mirror beneath the title, and that this mirror is surrounded by ornate angels and cherubs? Does it matter that Benjamin, himself, died as result of the state’s power to enforce citizenship, to permit existence, along the Spanish border while fleeing fascist, anti-Semitic nationalism? Does it matter that no one knows where his bones remain?
And how is longing limited by the language in which we come to know it? I’m thinking of the American version that is often associated with consumer goods or childhood brands. I’m thinking of the way nostalgia is weaponized to claim a territory through erasure of those who exist. Longing is the word I use because it is the word I have but it does so very little here, alone.
Identity is the word in which I misunderstand myself. The bedrock of allegiance is the power of allegation. What is a traitor? Where does the writer’s loyalty or allegiance lie? Which map is the final one? I ask myself again and again, knowing the answer Choi offers is not intended to comfort me, or give me the security I have come to expect from American self-help’s navel-dazed vocabulary.
How we know who we are is an epistemological question — not how we know we exist but rather how we come to the knowledge of identity, history, our place in it. By bringing imagined orphans, angels, ancestors, mirrors, “Commies,” images, birds, and various modes of translation into the frame, Choi recreates the epistemic basic for knowing, or what it means to be known. She destabilizes memory — her own, that of her father’s photos, that of testimonies, and witnesses — to reveal the multiplicity of human experience under the settled tone of a photo or a map. In so doing, she undermines imperialist power at its integument, in the words created to sustain it, the boundaries drawn to enforce it, and the violence of language against human experience. I know she will return to this.
[Review, Notes as Form of Return]
[*] In this meeting, I revisit my self, my selfhood, as a child of political defectors who fled a dictatorship for the US, including all the compromises and alienation that fleeing one’s family, language, and known history includes.
[1] See Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and On the Language of Man,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz. (Mariner Books, 2019) p. 331. See also p. 349, “Language is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of noncommunicable.”
[2] My reading and understanding of nostalgic temporarily is deeply informed by Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2016).
[3] Most nation-states derive their legitimacy from their ability to back up threats to security with force. Restoration, in this case, would mean “restoring” a prior time and place. This is usually the province of what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” the cognitive engine for restorative nationalism’s reactionary, conservative, purist demands. I am influenced by Boym’s view of longing as a utopian, insatiable directionality rather than an end.
[4] There is a sense in which Choi uses the end-notes to clarify or re-visit the poem-maps in this book, to question them and destabilize them. Because I think this strategy supports Choi’s theory of translation, I might make similar use of it to undermine my own statements. Any later, after all, is a different story. Perhaps end-notes acknowledge the importance of translation’s temporalized “later.”
[5] I am using poet Dana Levin’s term “open space” to re-designate the space often called “white space” in poetics. This, too, changes the map by revising the key.
[6] Although Choi doesn’t reference the documentary film, Winged Migration (2001), I felt the presence of those birds, the music, the silence of creatures using their bodies to move across a sky. The language of birds does not include fences. It does not grapple with the guilt of migrating humans who leave others behind. Choi translation of inaccessible space, and the body’s relation to wings, enacts a returning.
[7] In French, “la mode” references to “the fashion,” indicating fashion or style. I thought about this as I read Walter Benjamin’s fruit and robe metaphor. The relationship between mode and model is interesting given the context of what Choi subverts, namely, clear demarcations.
[8] See Walter Benjamin. “The Task of the Translator.” Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. pp. 253-263.
[9] See E. Tammy Kim’s encounter with Choi’s work and person in “Long Division.” Poetry Foundation.
[10] For the fruit and robe metaphor, see Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, p. 257.
[11] I wondered about the way Asian-American, as a category of identity, glosses over the difference between a Japanese immigrant and a Korean immigrant. It’s as if anyone from the continent of Asia becomes an Asian once they arrive in the US. Certainly, this isn’t true, since many language cultures exist outside this Asian-ness, but we like big brushstrokes here–we prefer to refer to foreigners by continent rather than by language and culture. Perhaps the word forges and creates a new identity that immigrants lacked before arriving, and this identity is well-suited to American traditions of knowing as little as possible about any country outside its borders. I am grateful to Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings for exploring the complexity of Asian-American identity and offering a story of origin for it, as well as a poetics that refuses to “translate” Korean into the colonizing language. See “Illegibility was a political act,” p. 12. See also pages 139-203. Recto: Countless moments while working on this review I felt myself too foreign to it, and this foreignness translated into incompetence as I imagined how much more insightful, accurate or authentic a review by Hong might be. In these moments, I reinforced the interior walls which make us untranslatable to one another, thus creating new silos in which nationality or race or gender become silos, thus undermining the mode of translation.
[12] In an interview earlier this year with Liberation School, Ahn Hak-sop expounded on his reasons for staying in South Korea: “Korea is now divided, and the US occupies the southern part. We have to keep struggling here for the withdrawal of US army, the peace treaty, and peaceful reunification. I decided to stay here to fight for these goals. In 1952, I came here to liberate the southern half of the peninsula, and I need to stay here and continue that struggle.”
[13] Whenever I see it on a Census form, I feel nauseated, envious of those who can say: I am from X, meaning, this is where my family lives and where my grandparents are from and where I was raised and I am mapped by the knowledge of my experience onto that. To have a history of migration far enough in the past that no one remembers it outside digital ancestry seeking roots. To live in one language and be content in that colonization. The way envy combines with longing can be dangerous. Conceptualist artist Ilya Kabakov seems offer a way out of this by claiming it: “I am lucky, I am an orphan,” he says of the division between his Soviet life and his current life as an artist in the West. After leaving Russia, Kabokov developed his idea of artwork as “total installation” to create imaginary spaces infused with nostalgia that also served as imaginary homelands. See Svetlama Boym’s chapter, “Ilya Kabokov’s Toilet,” in The Future of Nostalgia for this story.
[14] This remains one of the most challenging applications of Walter Benjamin’s theory in the present. He did not resolve or flesh out how the body, itself, is translated, before his early death which was related to the problems of citizened/uncitizened bodies. He did not translate this language before dying by it.
[15] I thought of this inability to count those who perished again when reading Benjamin’s statement that language “contains its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity” where “its linguistic being, not its verbal meaning, defines its frontiers.” Reflections, p. 334.
[16] National identities are often forged in opposition to conquest or colonialism. The construction of Korean nationality was related to the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945 when the desire to use one’s own language, to exist in Korean, led to an intellectual engagement and call for Koreanness. The nation’s story of origin is often retold and taught as myth, a linear narrative which culminates in the state. Choi seems to question this linearity in current systems of knowledge and taxonomies. Aren’t ideologies, after all, a peg for the latest taxonomy–a wall which defines the “Commie” or enemy by hanging them for public example?
[17] See Dan Beachy-Quick, “A January Notebook,” at Evening Will Come. Also: the poem’s fulcrum generally designates where a word or image separates what has gone before from what will come after. Note how the epigraph of DMZ Colony ends with a command in the last lines of a poem by Aimé Césaire: “I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea / Rise sky licker”
[18] Walter Benjamin.”Notes On Violence.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz. (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), pp. 298, 316.
[19] I am thinking of shared response as a “response-held-in-common” here. A response which makes us complicit in the sustenance of a social practice. A behavior which rewards us with “belonging.” I am also thinking of the way Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling gesture was translated as a refusal to bow to this god of the US nation while also serving as a commemoration.
[20] See Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and On the Language of Man,” Reflections: Essays,Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz. (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), p. 343. I will quote again from this page and section in a few paragraphs.
[21] “Not writing, like writing, can be disloyalty, too. If one turns away from the storytelling of one’s mother, is it worse than turning away from one’s motherland and mother tongue?” Quoting from Yiyun Li, “Either/Or: Notes from a Difficult Year.” A Public Space. Thinking about the way in which the mother is present in the mother tongue, itself, its secret worries, intonations, and secrets.
[22] This felt so close to me as a person rendered worthy by USA anti-communist propaganda, and rendered questionably by what made my parents’ defection possible, and the complexity of Party membership in Ceausescu’s Romania. For a formally-adept dehumanization of Romanian mothers and peasants, see, most recently, Melissa Fay Greene. “30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact.” The Atlantic, 30 June 2020.
[23] See Reflections, p. 334. See also Chris Edgoose’s “Twins, Orphans, And Angels: On the Work of Don Mee Choi,” which he published on his blog in August 2020, and which remains one of the most thoughtful readings I’ve found on Choi’s poetics. I felt his questions and company somehow in this essay.
[24] What is “an independent shot”? How does the description of montage as a technique illuminate the words which describe her father’s memory of his mentor’s anti-neocolonial gesture? How does the mode of translation shift keep the image in motion? See also Jed Munson’s “Translation as Mode in DMZ Colony.” Chicago Review of Books. May 4, 2020 for interesting notes on maps and axes.
[25] Svetlana Boym. “Remembering Forgetting: A Tale of a Refugee Camp,” The Svetlana Boym Reader(Bloomsbury Academic, April 2018).