When I happen to mention to people that I translate contemporary Korean poets, I’m often asked which poets I translate into Korean. Am I to assume that they didn’t hear me right? Perhaps I didn’t speak loud enough? I’ve been yelled at by teachers for not speaking English loud enough and sometimes for not speaking at all. What would be a reasonable assumption? English to Korean, or Korean to English? Is translation always direction-specific? Or does direction specificity occur only between certain languages? Am I being unnecessarily unreasonable?

Translation, for me, is inseparable from geography, the geography of a million mines buried across the 38th parallel north, along the DMZ. It’s also inseparable from the US imperial war that killed over four million Koreans, mostly civilians. Translation happens for me inside the erased memory – 250,000 pounds of napalm falling daily, rain or snow. Miraculously, my parents survived the war and gave birth to me during the US-backed dictatorship. I grew up as a reasonable child. But because I’m from an unreasonable terrain, autogeography is compulsory for me. It’s compulsory for me to translate from Korean to English, rain or snow. 

In 2000, I went to Okinawa, a prefecture of Japan, to participate in a meeting organized by the International Women’s Network Against Militarism. (1) At the meeting, I interpreted for the survivors of sexual exploitation at camp towns around US bases in South Korea. I learned from this experience that translation is a political act. That not only our lives are interconnected, but our languages, by histories of imperialism, colonialism, and the neocolonialism of military and economic warfare. My translation journey and my life journey mirror one another. My mirror life flutters about like an unwelcome sparrow, perpetually homesick.

W.E.B. Du Bois observes in The Souls of Black Folk: ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others... One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body...’, Du Bois’s ‘twoness’, is born out of what he calls a ‘vast veil’,: ‘Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.’, (2)

The vast veil, when stretched across the Pacific Ocean, has a different function. The militarization of the veil is ever heightened in order to contain the imagined enemy, perpetuating imperial hegemonic control. The so-called ‘Manifest Destiny’, is woven into its every fiber. The veil manifests as endless barbed wire fences across the geography of unreasonableness. My twoness is born out of national division. My other is perpetually Red, ready to nuke or be nuked. I translate a poet who was born in the same country I was born in. We essentially grew up in the same house. When I translate Kim Hyesoon, my twin – who still lives in the house I was born in as if I had never left – reaches the poet’s house first and waits for my return. My twinness is born out of unreasonable destiny, of distance, of vast homesickness.

I think of her as a child. She reminds me, Don’t let your coat weigh you down. There’s no winter here. Your luggage will soon absorb the fog. (3) She barely tolerates my journey from Korea to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to the US, from Hong Kong to Germany, from Germany to Australia. She still has my comb, wears my scarf with ribbons and mittens. She remembers my flowered shirt and shorts, a hairpin in my hair. She remembers me as a child. She instructs me to return. She forgets that sparrows never return. Our eternal twoness propels memory and translation. Translation, for me, is a linguistic return. I return to look for her. She still speaks to me in her childish language. She instructs me to translate only the vowels. Sometimes just the consonants:

Sometimes I refuse to translate:

In 1999, I translated for Korean activists a short report on one of the women I met near a US military base in Dongducheon, which is now closed. Nearly all the US bases are being consolidated into two massive bases in the central part of South Korea and not along the border. Empire’s target is China, not the usual suspect, North Korea. This is what ‘the American strategic pivot to Asia’ (6) looks like. South Korea is one of the most convenient places on earth to install and signal the New Cold War because the old Cold War never ended on the peninsular. In military language, such base-rich neocolonial territory is referred to as a ‘Lily Pad’.

I use my neocolonial language for translation. It’s also my language of resistance. There’s always two of us. I must speak as a radical twin.

T.J. Clark opens his essay ‘Aboutness’ (8) on Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ by embedding himself in the naked man with a tonsure. Clark channels his voice and thoughts, writing as an embodied art critic:

Then he breaks out of his self-induced trance:

Such device or necessity, putting myself into the minds of the many protagonists of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry is a frequent phenomenon for me. In ‘Pig Pigs Out’ (9) no angel is standing next to me. I’m standing among other pigs: snuggly Pig, cozy Pig, XXXL Pig, pork Pig. Contrary to popular belief, pigs rarely have the time to sit, lollygagging around. There’s no such thing as leisure for our kind, for we are forced to pig out constantly. However, Pigs all have the same name. I’m Pig9. My short curly tail happens to resemble a number 9, a sign that I’m a pious Pig. As for my pig nose, it’s best left undescribed. My teeth have been pulled out already, so whenever I oink at the heavenly sky, my tongue is lonely all by itself. We are in high demand on earth because in 2003 the import of US beef has been banned due to mad cow disease. However, foot-and-mouth disease is ravaging our kind. Humankinds bury us alive. They dump us into trenches by the truckloads. We stand tiptoed on our small feet, crying. Poet Kim Hyesoon writes about us in relation to the way humankinds have also ravaged other humankinds during the dictatorship – a nameless disease. The translator standing next to me is in a revery of some sort:

Pigness is my device. I’m necessarily Pig. My radical twin with a hairpin in her hair stands next to me... I myself have no memory having just exited from Korea.

In ‘IS THERE WHITE LIGHT FOR US?’ (10) Kim uses a conjoined word 백합질식사시키는. (11) The literal translation is lilyasphyxiationmake. I translated it as ‘lilyasphyxiating’, then revised it to ‘lilyphyxiating’. I removed the kidney-resembling a. Such precise removal requires what translators like to call skill. I prefer to call it lilymethod. Lilymethod also involves listening intently to Kim Hyesoon’s bird language in her new collection Phantom Pain Wings. It took about a lilyyear for me to learn the bird language, and I even grew a pair of lilyears in the process. I can totally identify with the man with a bird in Clark’s trancelation, though the man appears to be earless:

From where I am, which is nowhere significant – peeking out of a bush, the man is talking with his hands. It must be his lilymethod. His fingers are as pointed as the bird’s beak, and his modest nose suggests that he may have been a translator on earth at some point. The bird is instructing the man to use his hands to transmit its language. Naturally, foreign language calls for hand gestures, the universal finger-pointing, and certainly finger flipping at times of ultra-terrestrialism. Bird’s message is transferred from hand to hand, fluttering forever upward to the fountain of birds. Bird’s incessant chatter is nobody’s business, but once translated into a cacophony of hands, it becomes everybody’s business:

How the man came to lose his ears may be another story, unrelated to his prior occupation. But I suspect they are related because the loss of ears and loss of years are sonically and physiologically related. My hearing is muffled, frayed, in disarray by the sound of my own heartbeat as my ears flutter back and forth from nowhere to the unreasonable terrain, inducing DMZ dizziness. Lily Pad must go! is all I can utter with my hands. From where I am, a translator’s ears must be ever ready to shift from lilyears to lilyyears, or even pigears. Not opposite of that. My ears must remain in flight within and without the veil, the hailing napalm, the vertigo of language. Not opposite of that. Liliness is a must, rain or snow.