Don Mee Choi
Autobiography=Autotranslation
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.
Translation is a Political Act
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.
Twoness
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
1
“2000 Meeting: International Women’s Summit to Redefine Security, Okinawa, Japan,” The
International Women’s Network Against Militarization, June 22-25, 2000, last accessed May 10,
2021, http://iwnam.org/what-we-do/international-meetings/2000-meeting-international-
womens-summit-to-redefine-security-okinawa-japan/.
34
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body . . ..” Du Bois’ “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 heightened in order to contain the imagined enemy, perpetuating
imperial hegemonic control. The so-called “Manifest Destiny” is woven into every fiber of the
veil. The veil manifests as endless barbed wire fences across the geography of unreasonableness.
My twoness is born out of national division. My other is always 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.
Twinness
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:
I erase the ㅇㅁㅁconsonants from 엄마 ŏmma [mommy] and leave only theㅓ,ㅏ
vowels. ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ,ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ, ㅓㅏ4
Sometimes I refuse to translate:
무궁화꽃이피었습니다
2
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Pocket Books, 2005), 6-7.
3
Don Mee Choi, “A Journey from Neocolony to Colony,” The Morning News Is Exciting (Notre
Dame: Action Books, 2010), 81-84.
4
Kim Hyesoon, “Ventriloquy of Air,” Phantom Pain Wings, trans. Don Mee Choi.
35
무궁화꽃이피었습니다
무궁화꽃이피었습니다
무궁화꽃이피었습니다5
Radical Twin
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.”
Another mysterious death of a GI’s woman. She had bled profusely, and dark spots were
found all over her body, Her face was flat against the floor with her tongue protruding.
Her landlady called the police because she hadn’t seen her tenant for several days. What
kind of work did she do?7
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.
Tranceness
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:
An angel in red stands next to me. The crowd on the other side of the angel appear to be
simple folk—I’m not priding myself on my tonsure and Roman nose—but they too are
5
Don Mee Choi, Hardly War (Seattle & New York: Wave Books, 2016), 10.
6
Kenneth Lieberthal, “The American Pivot to Asia,” FP, December 21, 2011, last accessed May
18, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/21/the-american-pivot-to-asia/.
7
Choi, “Diary of Return,” Morning News, 18.
8
T. J. Clark, “Aboutness,” London Review of Books 43, no. 7 (2021), 6.
36
focused on the light from above . . . I myself have no memory of having just exited from
the earth. (Uprightness is my natural element. I stand tiptoe on two small feet.)
Then he breaks out of his self-induced trance:
Obviously, it is a device, and not without dangers, to put the particulars and uncertainties
of Bosch’s panel into the mind of one of its protagonists. But it is not a device—it is a
necessity . . .
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:
(돼지=twaeji=Pig) + (뒈지=tweji=die) + (뒈지는 돼지=dying Pig=dead Pig=pig out
Pig) + (뒈지는 돼지는 돼지라고 생각하는 뒈지는 돼지다=dying Pig thinks dying
Pig is Pig) = (Pig who pigs out thinking that Pig who pigs out is Pig)
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.
9
Kim Hyesoon,“I’m Ok, I’m Pig!,” Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, trans. by Don Mee Choi (Notre
Dame: Action Books, 2014), 75-79.
37
Lilymethod
In “IS THERE WHITE LIGHT FOR US?” Kim uses a conjoined word
백합질식사시키는.10 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:
A man to my left is absorbed in conversation with a grey and white bird. It looks as if he
is instructing the creature—his fingers, like those of the rough theologian, are didactic . .
. Or is the man taking lessons from the bird?
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:
You were born inside bird
Not opposite of that
You died inside bird
Not opposite of that
You were born and died
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
10
Kim Hyesoon, Nalgae hwansangt’ong [Phantom Pain Wings] (Seoul: Munhakkwajisŏngsa, 2019),
162.
38
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.
Birds I seeded inside your body feel all lumpy—you must
Your blood is replaced with bird’s blood—you must
..............................
Like the way your throat is parched from thirst,
your body’s birds combust—you must
..............................
Birds inside you glimmer—you must
Don Mee Choi
May 18, 2021
39
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi
from I’m OK, I’m Pig!
Pig Pigs Out
It’s Pig, Pig who has never seen the outside, always Pig, depressed Pig, Pig who cries wolf, Pig
who has chosen the most terrified pig in the world to be the king, Pig who shouts Oh, fantastic
sewer! while hugging its pillow, Pig who laughs alone hoping mommy will get arrested, mommy
who gave birth to Pig who will pig out till it drops dead, Pig with bloated lips who thinks the whole
world is rice porridge, it's XXXL Pig, Pig who takes up the entire bed, its name can only be Pig,
shivering-shivering Pig whenever it hears Cross the ocean, yes-yes Pig who has never once raised
its head, Pig who pigs out from fear when it looks up at the vast night sky, Pig who pigs out
thinking that Pig who pigs out is Pig
Droopy front and back limbs Pig, oinks with its tail tucked between its legs Pig, air is bundled up
but why is it so heavy Pig, smells like a steaming cloud when you put your hand in its armpit Pig,
unbelievably soft Pig, ultimately snuggly Pig, play all your life riding on me Pig, rats gnaw on piglets
yet cozy Pig, what have you stuffed into your eyes Pig, why doesn’t Pig know that it's Pig Pig, a
photograph knows a mirror knows only you don't know Pig, never has looked out a window Pig,
teeth pulled Pig, sigh Pig, regret Pig, after its teeth are pulled out and its tail cut off its tongue is
lonely all by itself in its mouth Pig, but whenever it opens its mouth makes pig pig sounds Pig,
pork Pig
qqqq the sound of Pig crying along with a crow perched on its head
qqqq naturally it’s Pig screaming when its owner goes to jail and piss and shit rises up to
Pig’s knees
qqqq the words that Pig yells inside when it denies being Pig
qqqq the words that Pig utters You’re Pig when you turn around to look at
your mommy being taken away
qqqq most of all, the squeals of our nation’s pigs that don’t know that I’m Pig
40
Bloom, Pig!
Has to die even if it didn’t steal
Has to die even if it didn’t kill
Without a trial
Without a whipping
Has to go into the pit to be buried
Black forklifts crowd in
No time to say Kill! Kill!
No time for the blood to splatter onto the shit-smeared walls or light bulbs
No time for the piglets just popped out from the stomach to get skinned and made into cheap
colorful shoes
No time for the pale-faced interrogator wearing dark sunglasses to yell Fess up! Fess up!
No time to gamble with terror as if skipping rope, whether I can survive the torture or not
No time to bite the flesh of my mouth as if biting the hand that’s hitting my friend’s cheek in the
next room
No time to tie up hands and feet and pull my head back and force water into me
No time to say Mommy please forgive me, I was wrong, I won’t do it again
No time to put a towel over my face and pour water from a pot
No handcuff or strap
Every night I read my country’s history of torture
Then in the morning I open the window and sing loudly at the roofs below the mountain
How could I possibly forget this place?
I have Pig who needs to be rinsed with a song then go
Dear Song, Please stay stuck to my body for 12 hours
A horde of healthy pigs like young strong men get thrown into the pit
They cry in the grave
They cry standing on two legs, not four
They cry with dirt over their heads
41
It’s not that I can’t stand the pain!
It’s the shame!
Inside the grave, stomachs fill with broth, broth and gas
Stomachs burst inside the grave
They boil up like a crummy stew
Blood flows out the grave
On a rainy night fishy-smelling pig ghosts flash flash
Busted intestine tunnel their way up from the grave and soar above the mound
A resurrection! Intestine is alive! Like a snake!
Bloom, Pig!
Fly, Pig!
Boars come and tear into the pigs
A flock of eagles comes and tears into the pigs
Night of internal organs raining down from the sky!
Night of flashing decapitated pigs!
Fearful night, unable to discard Pig even if I die and die again!
Night filled with pig squeals from all over!
Night of screams, I’m Pig! Pig!
Night when pigs bloom dangling-dangling from the pig-tree
42
from Phantom Pain Wings
IS THERE WHITE LIGHT FOR US?
Bundle of rags under the dining table
Wings are bunched up
as if gasping
I wanted to be cool like the cold birds of the winter sky
But my hands tremble, for I despise my family so much
Every time I breathe, rags heave up and down
Flickering sound
Crashing sound
Apologetic houses everywhere
I keep having dreams about a bird under my older brother’s heel
Over there, tiny Mommy is under someone’s heel, but I can’t go and rescue her
Girl wraps the rags with her clothes and coddles them
That girl can’t be me
In the morning I brushed my teeth hard, but they didn’t turn white
I wondered whether my bones are white even if I don’t brush them
White Vindu Chakra from Daddy
Red Vindu Chakra from Mommy
Raw meat dyes my teeth daily
I steal a candle from a temple
43
I think about lighting my apologetic house up white
Smell of the Tibetan temple I’ve visited
Smell of shiny floors like all the faces at the temple
Smell of flesh stuck to bones
I think I’ve reached the top, dragging up my wings
but when I turn around there is no mountain
Ah, the dreadful white mountain is gone
Color white’s dormant period is brief
I write a letter from the flattened mountain,
You’re going to become filthy for sure
Damn mountain! How dare you perform the color white?
You died far faraway and returned
Daddy, like an owl,
you perch on the dining table
and see night during the day
night during the night
Daddy, when you’re too embarrassed
you swear every other word
like I swear at myself in the third person
Everybody said it was my fault
and not my brother’s fault
Daddy, your flesh-colored head
spews white hair like a white trumpet
Older brother’s flesh-colored head
spews black hair like a black trumpet
Sin redder than blood becomes whiter than snow
Jesus the master washer is on Mommy’s lap, giving a sermon
44
Jesus, Mommy’s Jesus, you raise up so many lilies
Jesus, you are lilyphyxiating Mommy!
Bundle of rags under the table
Girl spews rags like a rag trumpet
My body has no color white
I don’t perform color white
Bird’s Repetition
All the stories bird tells perched on the treetop are about me
Nothing about the rumors of my lies, my thefts and such but
something ordinary like how I was born and died
Bird talks only about me even when I tell it to stop or change the topic
It’s always the same story like the sounds of the high heels of the woman, walking around
in the same pair all her life
This is why I have a bird that I want to break
Like a poet who buys a ream of A4 paper
and crumples the sheets one by one and tosses them
I have a bird I want to break
When I crumple up my poems that are like
the family members inside a mirror in front of me
I can hear the stories of fluttering birds
“You were born and died”
Then I say, “You scissormouths” and
go buy a paper shredder
to shred every poetry book of mine
But later, when I opened up the shredder
a flock of birds were sitting inside, talking about me as if reading line by line
45
Moreover, each bird had a different face
and the hens talked about me even while sitting on their eggs
They didn’t even care to fly off
Instead, they clustered under the peanut tree and talked about me
like peanuts under the ground
So, I said to them, enough of telling the same old story of how I was born and died
How about something else?
For instance, how about the fact that I always wear the same high heels
to work and back
but when I’m under the same tree at the same park
I always dance a waltz
And do several movements of moon embrace
But they replied,
You were born inside bird
Not opposite of that
You died inside bird
Not opposite of that
You were born and died
46
찬란했음 해 (Glimmer—You Must)
네 몸에서 내가 씨를 심은 새들이 울퉁불퉁 만져졌음, 해
네 피가 새의 피로 새로 채워졌음, 해
네 발걸음이 공중으로 겅중겅중 디뎌지는 나날
바보 멍청이 네가 네 몸의 문을 찾지 못하는 나날
내가 되고 싶은 네가 네 몸에서 나가고 싶어 안달했음, 해
습한 여름에도 발아래 땅이 한없이 멀어지는 그런 가을이 온 것 같고
네 목구멍이 목마름으로 타들어 가듯
네 몸의 새가 타올랐음, 해
키득키득 네 입술 밖으로 연기가 새어 나오고
내 몸에 앉고 싶은 새가 더 더 더 달아오르는 나날
쿵쿵 울리는 심장의 둥지에서
쿵 소리 한 번에 새 한 마리씩
미지근한 네 두 눈의 창문 밖으로 언뜻언뜻 아우성치는 새들이 엿보이는
그런 나날
불불듯 날개가 크게 돋아났는데도 돌 속인 그런 나날
가슴 위에 얹은 네 오른손이 마치 네 엄마처럼
새들로 꽉 찬 네 가슴을 지그시 누르고
매일 그런 자세로 나를
네 안의 새들이 찬란했음, 해
47
Glimmer—You Must
Birds I seeded inside your body feel all lumpy—you must
Your blood is replaced with bird’s blood—you must
Every day, your footsteps stomp, stomp up in the air
Every day, idiotic, stupid you can’t find the door to your own body
You who wants to become me became frantic to leave your body—you must
It’s a muggy summer, but the ground below feels endlessly distant like autumn
Like the way your throat is parched from thirst,
your body’s birds combust—you must
Puffs of smoke leak from your lips
and birds that want to perch on my body become hot hot hotter by the day
Bam bam inside your heart’s nest
a single beat for each hatchling
The day I glimpse howling birds outside the windows of your lukewarm eyes
The day wings quickly sprout, but they’re inside the rock
Like your mommy, your right hand
gently pushes down on your chest filled with birds
48
You do that to me every day in same position
Birds inside you glimmer—you must
49
Johannes Göransson
The Metamorphic Sublime: On Translating Eva Kristina Olsson
I.
Eva Kristina Olsson has a long and rich bibliography that includes books of poetry, play,
performances, and films. She emerged in the late 80s and early 90s as part of a new wave of
women poets—which also included Ann Jäderlund and Katarina Frostensson—who wrote
strange, elliptical, and mysterious, but at the same time forceful and often erotic, poetry. But
Olsson always had an ambivalent relationship to the literary establishment. Although her first
book, The Crime, was published by the biggest Swedish publisher, Albert Bonnier, she was at the
same time affiliated with Stockholm Surrealist Group, a transgressive and antisocial group
engaged in Surrealist experiments, and acted out performance pieces, often as street theater.
Throughout her career she has veered between success and outsiderness. She has published with
a number of presses, big and small, and her performances have tended to eschew the established
venues. What all these works—works that could be said to form a kind of unwieldy, mutating
total artwork—have in common is a combination of the broken down (body, words) held
together by a luminous intensity.
To some extent, Olsson achieved a critical breakthrough of sorts with her 2018 book The
Angelgreen Sacrament (Black Square Editions, 2021), an intense, occult book about the interactions
between the poet and one (or several) angels. The word “interactions” is a too-bland word for
the intensive relationship with these entities, but it is not always easy to determine how they are
interacting—what they are doing to each other:
in a nothing vibrating nothing
an angel without wings
but with wings
and with wings
creates the white endlessly nothing soft rose petals
my pistachiogreen wings
90
of your endlessly fragile glance
in the allthetime collapsing hair
you rise
It is not clear who is saying or doing what to whom. Is the speaker the angel or the human
meeting the angel? Are they even different? Is it the reader who is being addressed by an angel?
And at the same time as the poem is full of “nothing,” it is profoundly erotic and physical: the
“nothing” vibrates “pistachiogreen wings,” the nothing is a “Nothing soft rose petals”—i.e., a
nothing that is also physical, natural, beautiful, present.
The “allthetime” repetend in this section emblematizes the intensity of the encounter. In
Swedish, the phrase “i det hela tiden” suggest an ongoingness, but the more conventional
translation “constantly” is too abstract, so we created the neologism “allthetime,” making sure
that it contained the word “hela” (“all”) to bring in the complete, overwhelming quality of the
interaction. The experience is all-encompassing in both time and space; we are submerged in it
even though it is made up of “nothing.” In an interview Olsson says about the encounter in the
book: “It is the ultimate living thing for me to talk to.”
Another way of putting it might be to say that the poem is the “ultimate living”
experience. Roberto Calasso has written: “Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the
thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. This is the immediate:
but pure intensity, as a continuous experience, is “impossible,” overwhelming.” It is this kind of
“divine” experience Olsson both discusses and involves the reader in: it is almost too much. The
result is what Calasso has called “absolute literature”: “literature at its most piercing, its most
intolerant of any social trappings.” Olsson’s book is the best instance I know of “absolute
literature.” Reader, speaker, angel: all are constantly pierced through by the luminous and intense
encounter. At times the encounter may seem erotic, but it is also violent. This may be why the
poem has to constantly reassure the angel, the human—perhaps most of all the reader—not to
be “afraid” but to go further into the poem, the encounter. This may be why Aase Berg, in a
review, called the book “tortuously beautiful.”
The piercingness is represented—or manifested—by a green light, a light that figures as a
motif in the text as well as in the layout of the book—which is covered by a shimmering blue-
green, semi-translucent cover as well as several pages that are simply green without text, as if the
91
text had been obliterated by an eruption of “pistachiogreen.” This green color seems both
spiritual and physical. I am reminded of Michael Taussig’s discussion of sacred color that can
transform the viewer: “Color vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity to the
fairytale extent that in looking at something, we may even pass into the image.” And: “color
comes across here as more a presence than a sign, more a force than a code, and more
as calor, which is why, so I believe, John Ruskin declared in his book Modern Painters that “colour
is the most sacred element of all visible things.”
Olsson’s model of the “sacred” is notably different than the Christian model. Rather
than Augustine’s model of the soul as something pure inside of a sinful body, of interiority as
purity, Olsson’s sacred is in unstable, mutating surfaces. She focuses on the body—of the
speaker and the angel—as it “vibrates” and “collapses.” In the interview mentioned above,
Olsson mentions that there is a secondary subject matter—or “inspiration” —to the book: “a
long pistachio green prom dress I wore when I was 16, 17 years old.” The intensity of the
“pistachio green” color brings together the body of the angel and a dress she wore when she was
young, the sacred and the profane existing as part of the same fabric.
2.
It’s a convention that translators writing about their translations should focus on the
“challenges” and “difficulties.” This accomplishes a number of things. To begin with, it shows
just how skilled the translator is to understand the texts and their contexts. Perhaps more
importantly, it shows that the translation is indeed, as US conventions have had it for a long
time, “impossible.” Or in more scholarly terms, it points out the difference between cultures.
This “estrangement” creates distance. In leading scholar Lawrence Venuti’s work, such
estrangement—which he calls for translators to emphasize with “foreignizing” translation
modes—is a necessary reminder to the English-language reader that the book is in translation,
that there is cultural difference. The translation becomes, in other words, pedagogical.
I was never convinced of these arguments. They seem fundamentally anti-poetry to me.
Reeks of what Rita Felski calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the mode of critical writing that
always holds the poem at a “critical distance.” It’s a stance that emphasizes expertise and
mastery, of the critic being in control of the text. If we are going to see the translation as an act
of mimesis, I would prefer to think of mimesis more along the lines of how Taussing, drawing
on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Mimetic Faculty,” describes as a kind of sympathetic magic
that creates transformation: “… mimesis has an inbuilt propensity to provoke a chain reaction in
which things become other things in a process of mimetic fission . . . This I call the
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‘metamorphic sublime.’” According to Taussing, this “mimetic excess” runs counter to the ideal
of mastery by provoking a sense of childlike “re-enchantment.” Like with the color, Taussig’s
(and Benjamin’s) mimesis is volatile, capable not just of helping a subject make sense of
experience, but of pulling the subject in, transforming them.
In translating Eva Kristina Olsson’s The Angelgreen Sacrament, there are plenty of
difficulties and challenges. The language is complex—full of seeming errors and distortions—
such as when objects seem to lose subjects, when plurals and singulars mingle, or when suddenly
a capital letter shoots up in the middle of a word. But for me none of those difficulties are
impediments or distancing. Rather they involve me—as a reader, as a translator—in a
relationship that could be called “the metamorphic sublime.” As the translator, I become the
poet, and I become the angel. I become green with luminosity.
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Eva Kristina Olsson
Translated from Swedish by Johannes Göransson
From The Angelgreen Sacrament
the hair
my green hair that throngs
but lets in
the black flecks
the round ones
the ones wholly without other names
and how they throng
wholly beyond my hair
the orange circles in the white
nothing
only a sideglance in your
nothing only my green steps
when you go
and collapse
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Nothing is everything
you are afraid
don’t be afraid
I am the only
I am the only
one you see
sitting on the step,
angel mounted in the stone step :
you, then
in the cooly vibrating
expanding vibrating nothing
the step
one step
then and now this mounted fear
in fear
this nothing in the step
which encloses itself in hair
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which opens itself in hair
and flies in the white endless
nothing soft rose petals
don’t be afraid
you are afraid
I am afraid
my pistachiogreen back glows through my endlessly fragile wings
this hair of orange circles
can you see her back in those of nothing
other than orange circles
I see, I fasten my eyes
my pistachiogreen back illuminates my endlessly fragile wings
my pistachiogreen back illuminates the orange circles
in a nothing vibrating nothing
an angel without wings
but with wings
and with wings
creates the white endlessly nothing soft rose petals
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my pistachiogreen wings
of your endlessly fragile glance
in the allthetime collapsing hair
you rise
in the allthetime collapsing back
you rise
in the allthetime cool
you rise
in the allthetime vibrating
you rise
in the allthetime expanding
you rise
in the allthetime nothing
you rise
in the allthetime collapsing angel-me
and reach your arms
toward no one’s arms no one’s hands
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only this nothing which loves you
and wants you close
which you want to be near
You are afraid
be afraid
see that longing
go to that longing which lies on the third step : your sacrament :
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