Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode

by Don Mee Choi

Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode explores translation and language in the context of US imperialism--through the eyes of a "foreigner"; a translator; a child in Timoka, the made-up city of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence ; a child from a neocolony. Literary Nonfiction.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry, Language, Academic

24 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2020

About the author

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.

Reviews

[ainee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay is essential reading, not only for an aspiring translator who is a Korean American immigrant woman like myself, but to “all of us translators, editors, and publishers whether we are from here or elsewhere,” as Choi writes here.

Choi riffs on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (tr. Harry Zohn) and close reads Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film, The Silence. She also discussed US-Korea militarized relations/occupation and the resulting neocolonial politics of translation/the traverse between the Korean and English languages.

The most profound thought from this essay that I am walking away with is how there is no “mother” tongue, because my “mother” tongue was never free of a force taking power—in fact, even hangeul’s original invention by King Sejong was meant to exclude women and commoners. The only “zone” in which women can express and use language free of patriarchal power structures would thus be Korean shamanism, where women act as the spiritual storytellers and entryways to other realms via a maternal/matriarchal system.

Though Choi doesn’t mention this in this essay, I think of how this spiritual “safe zone” also becomes implicated in regard to the presence of US Christian missionaries in Korea—another power takeover—that coincided with the arrival of the US military (it was through a US missionary that my originally Buddhist father learned English).

Choi’s essay should be considered required translation theory reading just as much as Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” usually is.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Benjamin leads us to his notion of “pure language,” the sum of all the languages of the world with Brot and pain as examples of words that have “different modes of intention” but “mean the very same thing.” But if I were to dislocate Benjamin’s Brot and pain into Korea’s neocolonial zone, they would probably encounter another word for bread, ppang [빵]. The Korean word for bread, ppang, is obviously a trans- formation or deformation of the French word pain. It is most likely that it arrived in Korea already deformed, through the Japanese deformation zone. And if I were to add oksusu [­옥수수], which means corn, in front of ppang—it becomes oksusuppang [옥수수빵]. Cornbread and oksusuppang do intend the same object, and may even taste the same, except that they arise from very different historical and political intentions. Oksusuppang was fed to school children in South Korea after the Korean War—it was intended as food aid from the US. So my tongue even before it had ever encountered the English language was a site of power takeover, war, wound, deformation, and, ultimately and already, motherless.'

(from Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, p5)

[alex kapsidelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a completely awesome piece of writing.

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Translation = making impossible connections between languages that are in fact connected by colonialism, I take this to mean working w the material of these languages, punning etc across them the way Choi does in her poetry. Rly like the idea of translation moving from second to third party (language itself never fully transparent), grounded in history of Hangul as complement to Chinese as well as how s Korea’s status as US neocolony shows up in language. Don’t fully get the mirror metaphor (I see smth about how u get reflection not thing itself, and smth about seeing yourself in it too though that’s not as explicit) and struggle w framing of “x is political act” but that’s ok

[eris · Rating 5 out of 5]

100% need to revisit this because there are lines of thought I don't feel I fully grasped, but what an astonishing essay. completely shifted my view of 'mother tongue' - the implications of the term and its reality.

[Nyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I pretended to be a foreigner even before I really became one. 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 out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.”

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was amazing and challenging and everything one could want when reading something about craft and moreover ways of thought

[nomi]

read for uni

[Lyra Montoya · Rating 5 out of 5]

language and border/boundary are articulated and connected to sound and orthography beautifully through media and image. Movement and diaspora in sound, space, place.

[Juliana (Juju) Gaspar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for my Translation Workshop Class and it is my favourite thing in the world.

[Anafú · Rating 5 out of 5]

“we are all motherless translators”
como traductora español-inglés aunque no vivo la misma experiencia (sobre todo al hablar español de España, colonizadora histórica) consigo empatizar y relacionarme con la información de la mejor manera. me ha parecido una manera mágica y poderosa de ver la traducción y lo narra tan hipnóticamente...me zampé el essay en 10 minutos.