Translation is a

Mode=Translation is an
Anti-neocolonial Mode

Don Mee Choi

~

As you may know, the first half of the title is from Harry
Zohn's translation of "The Task of the Translator"
by Walter Benjamin. 1 The other half, I hope, is its
twin-a retranslation, a radical hybrid of Benjamin's
brilliant concept and an anti-neocolonial stance I have
come to choose over the past fifteen years of translat-
ing contemporary feminist Korean poetry.

This hybridity comes from a land divided by the

superpowers of the Cold War. Prior to the US inter-
vention, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.
The year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of
Korea's division and the 67th anniversary of the
ceasefire that suspended the Korean War of 1950-
53. Most recently, in 2018, the North Korean and
South Koreans leaders have signed the Panmunjom
Declaration, calling for peace and reunification.
However, without a formal peace treaty agreed by
all parties-North and South Korea, China, and
the US-the two Koreas remain technically at
war . Nearly 4 million, mostly civilians, were killed
during the war. 2 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.
I speak as a twin.

1
The US established a temporary military rule of Counterblow, Strong Shield, Focus Lens, Team Spirit,
Korea from 1945 to 1948 and never left . South Korean RSO&I (Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and
activists say there are nearly one hundred US mili- Integration), Key Resolve, Foal Eagle. These are
tary bases and installations in South Korea, a land neocolonial joints, hybrids, spirits-these are "order-
only one fourth the size of California. 3
In a few years words" to use Deleuze and Guattari's term. I traverse
6

the bases will be consolidated into two massive bases such order-words and map them, and superimpose
' another kind of map-the map of my dislocation,
one of which will become the largest overseas US mili-
tary base. Currently, there are approximately 28,000 including my translations of Kim Hyesoon's poetry.
US troops stationed in South Korea. In time of war, For me, Benjamin's "Translation is a mode" must be
the US military has operational control over South jointed with "Translation is an anti-neocolonial mode."
Korean forces.4 Since we are still technically at war, we I must speak as a twin.

~"·""'"T·-"''
....Srrmlou "'°·"" •.,,_ t~lJ;j are also technically
UN\A, n llu-r.\0:,,$..)0TU(a 'a-~t..\JIIO 1G50
,,~
Mt For Deleuze and Guattari "language is a map, not a
· ,- - · ./ " and perpetually un-
cu l'!-l !

der US military tracing," because they say, "language is not content

command. I come to go from a first party to a second party, from one
from such neocolony. who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes
..... Kr.,..,.:.o,o,
J-~~
..,_
1-.,0
from a second party to a third party, neither of whom
has seen." 7 Translation is a map, a mode that can
. , t •. , Sra of ] aprm . Since the end
.. · • , · trigger endless crossings from one party to another,
~ :/ ' d. -v IM, P,'1l 'd
(F,rmS,11)
'
of the Korean
t. ~- ---✓~ -~ { War, the US and "neither of whom has seen." So when Benjamin points
r - ~ $,t-1\,.. ... "'
. '~ ,.. :,
"t:\r.= . ·, South Korea have out that "translation which intends to perform a
...
,
Yrlluw
' •
:-
'-d~/1.ntatC
· ,; ,..,, carried out joint transmitting function cannot transmit anything
· S,a ·
military exercises. 5 but information-hence, something inessential,"
- -~· l The names of these I believe, like Deleuze and Guattari, he is also point-
· •~· Jfw_~.~~.~tit ._.,.,,,,,,,<'
·.
-;--
·,.~~rt·
. ,.
, . 1'---_,, ';
. \ ·r #f"
. ~ joint exercises are ing to the mapping aspect oflanguage and translation,
r.,,..
.
z:;;:t
nJ>'. ~~-
(>_
beyond the tracing. In a little translation manifesto
~o· i~~
it.di ,.-
...~1
>('~l - (►h. worthy of our atten-
¼ ,.
•

-;;------,"""""""'
..,
-. le.... . ~ called Deformation Zone by Joyelle McSweeney and
tion as translators:

2 3
 .. nsson translation is already a mode of one tongue, almost. Because in a neocolonial zone,
Johannes Gora ' ,
f art a radical "regime" that "trans- as Deleuze and Guattari have already noted, "there
ap a work O '
am ' " nfiorms." · "bot h a thing
· 1s
Trans 1ation
forms" an d co , is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a
a material, and a conveyance, a way dominant language."
a substance,
erial is converted to another form." In
that one mat
the deformation zone, translation is "a wound that Benjamin leads us to his notion of "pure language,"
makes 1·mpossible connections between languages , the sum of all the languages of the world with Brot
unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas and pain as examples of words that have "different
of literature." 8 modes of intention" but "mean the very same thing."
But if I were to dislocate Benjamin's Brot and pain
I am not content to just go from Korean to English. into Korea's neocolonial zone, they would probably
I am not content to uphold the notion of national The
encounter another word for bread, ppang [llllJ-].
literature-the notion that literature outside of the Korean word for bread, ppang, is obviously a trans-
Western canon is always bound to national borders. formation or deformation of the French word pain. It
What this implies is that the so-called national liter- is most likely that it arrived in Korea already deformed,
ature simply needs to cross linguistic and national through the Japanese deformation zone. And if I were
borders, as if such borders are entirely ahistorical to add oksusu [*44], which means corn, in front of
and apolitical. Whenever poet Kim Hyesoon is asked ppang-it becomes oksusuppang [*44llllJ-]. Cornbread
whether her poetry represents her country-a ques- and oksusuppang do intend the same object, and
tion that is rarely asked of a poet whose work is may even taste the same, except that they arise
' I

perceived to be rooted in the Western canon-she from very different historical and political intentions.
never fails to answer that her poetry comes from the Oksusuppang was fed to school children in South
Republic of Kim Hyesoon. I want to make impossi- Korea after the Korean War-it was intended as food
ble connections between the Korean and the English, aid from the US. So my tongue even before it had ever
for they are misaligned by neocolonial war, milita- encountered the English language was a site of power
rism, and neoliberal economy. The two languages takeover, war, wound, deformation, and, ultimately
have very little in common linguistically, yet they are and already, motherless.

4 5
 __
r ....,..... necessity, its invention. 10
Therefore, even within my
I
so-called mother-tongue, I was already born with a
tongue with a task to translate, but motherless and
expelled from power.

No one is immune from the power takeover, not even

.. King Sejong. In the 2016 trilateral US-South Korea-
Japan military drill against North Korea, three
South Korean warships named after King Sejong
were sent across the South China Sea to the territori-
alized waters of Hawaii.11

The Korean vernacular script hangul was invented These warships are equipped with a ballistic missile

in the 15th century by King Sejong and his team of defense system made by Lockheed Martin, called
linguists to match the spoken Korean language, and Aegis Combat · ~ -- ----
' ...
it was intended for women and commoners who did System, named
--~

not have access to formal education. What is not after a shield

well-known about hangul is that it also had another worn by Zeus and

function for the upper class; it was meant "as an aid Athena in Greek

to correct pronunciation of Chinese characters" and mythology. This

for producing translated annotations of Chinese is what trilateral-

texts. 9
In other words, the vernacular script was militarized-translation drill looks like. It floats, it

invented to maintain the class division by having kills. My tongue and your tongue are already an

two separate writing systems, keeping women and aggregate, a site of multiple and collective enuncia-

commoners outside of privileged knowledge, and tion. "There is no individual enunciation" as Deleuze

therefore, outside of power. To put it more bluntly, and Guattari have said. 12 I say, we are all :floaters, we

a power-takeover was part of the vernacular script's are all motherless translators.

6
7
 oksusuppang, cornbread, most remark
What mak es - ;
', .,, :
....
,, ,..
. t the seemingly benign humanitarian ~

able 1s no
. t·10nbehind it ' but the fact that on a local, bodily , \~
mten
tongue 1eVel , it creates involuntary longing, a life- :jjF(
·ng which could easily be translated as a -:~
,". .~· .-,
1ong eraVl , .\? ·:,·,-
desire to be colonized, and it certainly is translated
this way at the level of US foreign policy, particularly
at the level of military maneuvers . But my tongue
deforms, it disobeys. I translate this longing, entan-
gled with neocolonial dependency, as homesickness,
which is a form of illness, a form of intensity. Ingmar Bergman 's film The Silence (1963 ) opens with
a scene on a train in which Ester, an ill transl ator,
coughs up blood . The boy is Johan , a son of Ester's
sister , Anna, who is not a trans lator , and t herefore
not ill. The only time when Ester t he translator is
not coughing up blood or dea t hly ill is when she is
typing up her translation or taking not es while she's
reading. And we are also introduced to Bergman's
made-up language posted on the glass window of the
cabin : NITSEL STANTNJON PALIK. Little Johan
points out the foreign words to his transl ator aun t,
Ester , and asks, "Wh at does it mean? " She answers,
"I don't know." They are t ravelling in a foreign coun-
try , and an impending war or mil itary takeover is
suggested by the images of tanks and men in mili-
tary uniforms with bere t s and sungl a sses at a town
called Timoka.

8 9
 ~-- -
----- - - -7

Bergman's genius lies in the use of mirrors throughout like jibberish, is a glass among glasses, a sign among
the film. I see Bergman's mirrors as sites of transla- signs, language among languages.
tion, deformation zones. This scene takes place almost
entirely on a large mirror in Ester's room. Soon after Kim Hyesoon's genius also lies with the way she uses
their arrival in Timoka, Ester, needing more drink, mirrors. In her poem, "Memories of Giving Birth to a
has called the hotel waiter and asks him whether he Daughter," crossings take place through mirrors, they are
speaks French, English, then German. The framing zones of intensities through which an intensity passes:
of the shot is such that we have a close-up of the wait-
er's face, outside the mirror, and Ester is seen standing 1 I open a mirror and enter,
reflected in the mirror, holding an empty bottle of booze. mother is inside a mirror, sitting.
The waiter's mouth moves but the sounds he utters I open a mirror and enter again,
are silence with occasional incomprehensible jibber- grandmother is inside a mirror, sitting.
ish. Obviously,he's speaking a foreign language. Then I push aside this grandmother mirror and step over a doorsill,
miraculously, the bottle makes its way into the hands great grandmother is inside a mirror, laughing.
of the waiter, outside the mirror. This miraculous act, I place my head inside great grandmother's laughing lips,
taking place in the mirror, is an act of translation, a great-great grandmother, younger than me
translation performance. It's only natural that the turns around inside a mirror, sitting.
translation is conducted in the mirror, for it is a site I open this mirror and enter,
of various reflections, languages, a site where things enter, and
are already mirrored, re-represented, a site where enter again.
language "goes from a second party to a third party, All the ancestral mothers are sitting
neither ofwhom has seen." Like translation, Bergman's inside a darkening mirror,
' and these mothers mutter and call in my direction,
mirror is a site of mapping. Foreign words appear
first posted on the glass window of a train cabin, then
spoken foreign words are exchanged in the mirror of a
hotel room. And what moves across the mirror, is also
I "Mommy, Mommy."13

Mirrors have been long used in Korean shaman's ritu-

a glass, an empty bottle. The clear bottle like silence, als as armor, to intensify energies, to induce trances,
'
10 11
or to light a path to the underworld during spirit-travel. were handed back to her all blackened with ink. I think
Within the oral tradition of Korean shamanism, the of Kim Hyesoon's mirrors as shields. Her poems also
realm ,women were expelled to, women were free to induce in me a trance-like state because, afterwards, I
express and explore their identities. It was the only can never remember how I translated her poems. Most
zone in which women, as performers of rites, songs, importantly, Kim's mirrors are translation surfaces-
and storytelling, were not subservient to men. In this they house mothers with motherless tongues, making
zone of shamans, the lowly outsiders, the spoken and endless crossings from one generation to another, from
written hangul thrived. So Kim Hyesoon's mirrors woman to woman, from language to language, creating
15
derive from a historically and linguistically expelled what Benjamin calls an "embryonic or intensive form."
zone. And Kim points out that this was where women
could redefine their prescribed identities through
shaman narratives, such as "Princess Abandoned."
The place Princess Abandoned "travels to via death
is a place of death within life ... a feminine space of
creation. It is hyonbin." Kim explains hyon as "closed
eyes therefore everything is black and bin as a signi-
fier for female reproductive organs, a mouth of a lock,
a valley, a mountain spring ... inside this dark womb
the possibility of all life is held. At that place patriar-
chy, the male-centered thing breaks, the universality Bergman's translation mirrors are pregnant with
of all things breaks." 14 I call it a place of women's illness, homesickness, and even puns. Here is another
chorus (not to be confused with KORUS, which stands remarkable translation image. A newspaper carrier
for Korea-US free trade agreement). There is another hands a newspaper to Ester's sister, Anna, and she
layer to Kim Hyesoon's expelled zone. While Kim quickly flips through the paper written injibberish, in
Hyesoon was working as an editor she had to go back a foreign language, and briefly notices the only thing
and forth between the publishing house she worked she is familiar with-an announcement of Johann
for and the military censors. Many of the manuscripts Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. And then to a

12 13
shot where we see the newspaper board on the back
Like Kim Hyesoon's ancestral mothers, Ester practi-
of the carrier (also with foreign words) and at the cally lives inside the mirror amongst other mirrored
same time Anna's eye in the mirror of her compact images-those "fancy books" that she translates, as
powder case. The powder case is empty, so she didn't pointed out by Anna with a tone of envy, sarcasm,
really open it to powder her face, but to translate, and and disapproval. Anna despises her ill sister who
what's mirrored is her own eye, a variation of her eye. lives inside the mirror, perpetually working on fancy
She is not a translator, but her eye is already a site of books written in a foreign language. To Anna, Ester is
variations. I like to think that Bergman is punning practically a foreigner. So it's only natural that Anna
here: "She may not be a translator, but she does have hates Ester. Like translation, foreigners are despised.
an eye for translation." Anna's son, like his Aunt Ester, is prone to foreign
words and, therefore, homesickness. Ester asks
Johan, Are you homesick? And he nods, Yes. Little
, -\_..::i-
" - Johan is also confined to bed, reading a Russian
1\_i
1:l"' ,,. novel in translation, A Hero of Our Time, and asks
.. , his aunt why she translates. The Silence ends with
. _..,...._~

;,., ~ .. , Little Johan reading the foreign words that his aunt
r :
' ;r~~ has written down for him. He has become a foreigner
like his translator aunt.

While Anna is out and about chasing her bodily

desires, Ester is more or less confined to bed. And
the hotel waiter who tends to Ester's illness, when
not uttering silence or foreign words, retreats into his
own room. It's not uncommon to find foreign words
in a dark cubby-hole, perhaps enjoying a morsel of
cornbread, when they are not performing translation.

14 15
 I could instantly recognize Bergman's made-up jibber-
ish language because that is how English appeared to
me when I was growing up in South Korea. I pretended
to be a foreigner, pretending to write in English,
because I thought my father, who was frequently away
from home for work, was a foreigner and wanted to be
like him. What ! wr?te was pure jibberish. So jibber-
ish, foreign words, incomprehensibility was my very
:first encounter with "intensive form." I pretended to
be a foreigner even before I really became one. As a
foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incompre-
hensibility-a mirror image of myself. I seek mirrors
through which I can also traverse, in order to map
I became a foreigner when I was a few years older than out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate
Little Johan. We were fleeing from the US-backed myself. Like Ester in The Silence I also live inside the
dictatorship of Park Chung-bee, which began in 1961 mirror, the intensifier, the site of my anti-neocolonial
and came to a halt in 1979 when he was assassinated translation. Mirrors may be my very own cubby-hole.
by his own head of intelligence, only to be replaced by
the even more brutal dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. My encounter with contemporary Korean women's
poetry happened about the same time as my involve-
ment with an organization called The International
Women's Network Against Militarism, which is made
up of students, teachers, researchers, and grassroots
activists from Okinawa, Japan, South Korea, Hawaii,
Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the US. The US
members make up a group called Women for Genuine
Security, which is based in Oakland. My primary

16 17
r
11
. h e network was to translate and interpret
role mt
by war. It is bombing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
for South Korea n activists and survivors of military
Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya. And Nick Turse
.
violence an d sexual exploitation. At the Network's
reports in The Nation that its Special Operations
thir. d m
• t ern ational meeting in Okinawa, Japan in
forces carry out countless missions on a daily basis
2000, the Network members first articulated what in 135 nations, which is "roughly 70 percent of the
has since become a core part of our approach: the idea
countries on the planet." 16 Neocolonial-neoliberal
that "interpretation is a political act." We were able
militarism is manufactured in the USA. This is why
to arrive at this perspective because of the knowledge
I think "Translation is a mode=Translation is an
the women in the Network had been accumulating
anticolonial mode" is relevant to all of us translators,
and creating since the first meeting in 1997-the
editors, and publishers whether we are from here or
knowledge that not only our lives and struggles are
elsewhere, whether we are foreigners or not, whether
interconnected, but that our languages are also inter-
we speak silence, foreign words, jibberish, or English.
connected by histories of imperialism, colonialism,
I speak as a twin.
and militarism, and by increasing economic interde-
pendence. So this experience in the Network helped me
to realize that translating Korean women's poetry
is also a political act. It was no accident that I was
translating Kim Hyesoon's poetry. Kim Hyesoon was
an active member of a feminist organization, Another
Culture [.:E t}4~ and much of their activism
-%:§.l.],
overlapped with the activism of the South Korean
women in the Network.

I don't think it is redundant to say that many of the

weapons against humanity are manufactured here
in the USA. The empire's belly is perpetually bloated

18 19
r-
!
I References 12 Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 79.
I
I 1 Wa1ter BenJa • mi·n, "TheTaskoftheTranslator"in/lluminations , 13 Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju,Anxiety of Words,
NY· Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 69-82
trans. Harr Y Zohn, ( · · trans. Don Mee Choi (Zephyr, 2006),

' 2 "Women Cross DMZ," accessed August 1, 2016, https://WWw. 14 Kim Hyesoon, Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers, trans.
,111
1, womencrossdmz.org/. Don Mee Choi (Action Books, 2008), x.
l
I
3 Living Along the Fenceline, directed by Lina Hoshino and 15 Benjamin, "Task," 72.
Gwyn Kirk, Women for Genuine Security, 2011.
16 Nick Turse, "How Many Wars is the US really Fighting?,"
4 "WomenCross DMZ." The Nation, accessed August 30, 2016, https://www.thenation .
com/article/how-many-wars-is-the-us-really-fighting/.
5 Robert Collins, "A Brief History of the US-ROK Combined
Military Exercises," 38 North, February 26, 2014, accessed July
25, 2016, http://38north.org/2014/02/rco11ins022714/.
Acknowledgments
6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 76. This essay is based on a talk given as the keynote lecture at the
2016 American Literary Translators Association Conference,
7 Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus, 77. Oakland, CA

8 Joyelle Mcsweeney and Johannes Goransson, Deformation

Zone (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011).

9 Theresa Hyun, Writing Women in Korea: Translation and

Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century (University of Hawaii,
2003), 6.

10 Hyun, Writing Women, 6.

11 Wyatt Olson, "US, Japan, S. Korea conducting first joint ballis-

tic missile defensed n·11,"J une 27 , 2016, Stars and Stripes,
. accessed
July .15' 2016, htt p.·//www.stnpes.com/news/us-Japan-s-korea-con-
· .
ductmg-first-joint-ballistic-missile-defense-drill-1 .416554 .

20 21
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1·
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i

Translation is a mode=Translation is an anti-neocolonial mode

© Don Mee Choi, 2020

Images of Ingmar Bergman 's The Silence © AB Svensk

Filmindustri (1963) Photo : Sven Nykvist/Rolf Holmqvist.

Map image on page 2 printed with the permission of

Mapping Specialists, LTD.

2020 Pamphlet Series

ISBN 978-1-937027-97-1
First Edition , First Printing
Edition of 1,000

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