For So J. Lee, 2020 has been a year of growth. Just two years after their first translations were published, the Seoul-based writer and translator became Modern Poetry in Translation’s current Writer-in-Residence, recently released the fourth issue of chogwa (their quarterly e-zine showcasing multiple translations of a single poem), and will publish their full-length translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla next month, followed by Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Soho’s Catcalling in 2021.
For an emerging translator working in the midst of a global pandemic, Lee’s list of publications is undeniably impressive. But one of the many things that 2020 seems intent on teaching us is that growth can no longer be measured solely in terms of productivity and output. In correspondence and conversation, it’s clear that So J. Lee has already embraced a new kind of metric, acknowledging growing pains and citing introspections, laughter, and everyday pleasures as equally significant indicators of their progression. This was especially evident when I contacted Lee in June, keen to learn more about their forthcoming books, zine, bilingual events, and drag performance. I wanted to begin our interview with a discussion around the imminent publication of Unexpected Vanilla, but instead, Lee asked if we could start the conversation with an unusual announcement . . .
—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2020
So J. Lee (SJL): Can I start this interview by announcing my hibernation this winter?
Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course! Can I ask why you intend to hibernate?
SJL: When Kim Tae-ri was asked about her plans after shooting a film and a TV series back-to-back in 2018, she said, “I plan to enter hibernation. I grew ten cm over the winter break prior starting high school. Let’s see what happens this time.” I love her casual re-articulation of rest as an opportunity for growth. I mean, rest is also rest. I don’t want to glamorize busyness, in the slim chance anyone sees me as a glamorous being. My vibe is more Pizza Rat anyway.
STH: Apart from the obvious pressures facing the world at the moment, what has kept you from resting over the past few months?
SJL: Grief. Ineffable grief and rage. Somehow we have to rest and allow for joy amidst it all. I’m still practicing.
I’m animated by my three forthcoming books, Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), all of which I reflect on in my recent essay, “Not Exactly a Sister.” I translate women writers who write about women for women, so the word Unni became an organic through-line for introducing their works all at once.
As Modern Poetry in Translation’s Writer-in-Residence, I’m also hosting a virtual workshop on Lee Jenny’s concrete poem “Space Boy Wearing a Skirt.” After that will be my interview with Lee Soho and the fifth issue of chogwa!
STH: Wow, you have been busy! Can we talk about your translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, which is set to be published by Tilted Axis next month? In 2019, Asymptote published several poems from the collection, including my favourite, “Erasable Seeds.” The poem describes a connection between two people as “a newly thickening forest” grown from “small seeds.” I think about that poem a lot. Like most of Lee Hyemi’s work, it is incredibly sensual and also reminds me of that moment when you first read a poem or line in someone’s poetry or fiction that’s so striking, you know that you just have to translate it. Do you remember which line of Unexpected Vanilla did that for you?
SJL: I was assigned in a translation workshop to translate a poet I’d never read before, and I wanted to try someone younger than Heo Su-gyeong, whose poems I’d tried translating as an undergrad. Then a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I read the poem “Femdom” in the final section and realized that this young Korean woman was writing surrealistically about kink! I wanted to tell all my friends about it, which remains my biggest motivation to translate.
I’ve written about the Unni line in “Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” so many times already, but it’s simply iconic. Plus, Lee Hyemi wrote a variation of that line in my copy of the book: “We must be one person, cunningly divergent. Sharing an intimate language.” I’ll always remember the way she pulled out a stamp shaped like a fish and blended multiple colors before pressing it to the page.
The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing. Korean is a pronoun-dropping, honorific-using, plural marker-omitting, agglutinative, head-final, subject-object-verb language—everything English is not. Carrying over lineation is a minor miracle.
For that reason, I’m happy with how I recreated the opening couplet in “Taste of Wings”: “This is the story of two equal tongue-tips, / of white double flowers laid on lips.”
STH: Where and how do you usually like to translate?
SJL: You know, I’ve been thinking about your wonderful interview with Raquel Salas Rivera, specifically your question, “Where or when are you most yourself?”
I spend a lot of time in bed. I read, write, and work in bed more often than not. My chronic pain is something I don’t like to discuss, in part because it feels unbelievable even to me. Sure, I’m ‘able’ to do this or that. But this stupid pain accompanies me every step of the way.
I’ll probably continue not to mention it in direct correspondences because I don’t want to place the burden of consolation on any one person . . . but I thought I’d mention it here for anyone forcing themselves to work at a desk just because that’s what we’re ‘supposed’ to do.
Swimming helps me physically and spiritually, but I haven’t been able to go due to COVID-19. Sometimes I like to play music while I write (right now I’m listening to the new Jessie Ware album, What’s Your Pleasure?) so I remember to move my body and take stretch breaks.
Because writing, researching, and translating are things we do without a clear ‘end’ in sight—that is, we ourselves have to decide when we’re ‘done’—I have to spot my own limit and always stop short of that. I can’t give my all every single day and expect myself to keep going.
Not long ago, I was a full-time student working multiple freelance gigs: editing thirty-page literary translation samples and translating business case studies and making subtitles and translating exactly one one hundred-plus page pamphlet of product descriptions for a Korean conglomerate. The non-literary stuff probably gave me carpal tunnel, but they taught me to be less precious about my translations and to meet that mf’ing deadline. Oh, and gave me money to survive.
STH: Speaking of survival, I’m curious about your approach to translating Lee Soho’s Catcalling, which is an exceptionally beautiful text, but also quite intense and deliberately claustrophobic in places. When you are translating work of this nature, how do you get yourself in the right headspace?
SJL: Whew, this question! For me, it’s easier to get in than to get myself out of it. The intensity is there in the source text, and I absorb it like a scuba diver absorbs nitrogen gas. If a diver ascends too quickly, the nitrogen gas in their body will expand faster than they can eliminate it, which I’ve been told is extremely painful and even life-threatening. So now I schedule in time to decompress after an hours-long dive into a text.
I told Lee Soho a couple months back that I was ‘method translating’ against my will. (I won’t elaborate here, but I hope my recollection of events will someday enter the alternative and transformative spacetime of poetry.) With the help of my friends, I’ve since moved out of the violent housing situation and into a two-bedroom apartment where I have a lovely housemate and a lovely terrace with lovely plants. Just yesterday, I noticed my cherry tomato plant’s first bebé, and she became another reason to make it through this summer.
All this to say, I don’t recommend method translating unless the text is a sweeping romance or a long poem about swimming in a cenote or something.
STH: I adore your zine, chogwa, which launched in 2019. Each issue features one poem (usually Korean, but in the latest issue, curated by the fabulous Norman Erikson Pasaribu, the poem was Indonesian) and multiple English translations. What was the inspiration for this particular format?
SJL: It takes decades, if ever, for a book of translation to be retranslated and republished. I made chogwa so I could read more translations of Korean poetry before the world ends.
Of course, I didn’t invent the idea of multiple translations last year. In fall 2018, I read Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, an anthology edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, and thought it was a cool book in terms of layout as well. Then I read Annisa Savitri’s poem “Menukar Rindu”, translated four ways by Ninus Andarnuswari, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Madina Malahayati, and Fajar Santoadi in The Margins. I was shaped by these texts in addition to my workshop experiences across various institutions, where my translations were compared alongside those of my peers and/or published professionals.
I can’t say everyone has been supportive of multiplicity. Many insist on narrowing the options down to a ‘correct’ version. Once, I received a list of all the things I ‘should’ve’ done from one of three judges for a grant (that I won), and the comments were so brutal that I actually started to laugh out loud in my room. Yeah, I could’ve done that, I thought, but I didn’t. That burst of laughter was probably a turning point for me.
And yet, I didn’t know what to expect with chogwa. I was hoping for four translators but then I got ten for the first issue! And ten again for the second issue! I couldn’t believe it—I had to throw a live event to see that these people were real.
As for my commentary, I want compliments to be as constructive as criticism. I really believe that we can grow while being accepted for who we are in the moment. I re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reread the entries as well as my comments to ensure that nothing I say feels barbed. I’m reminded of this tweet from Claire Schwartz: “I don’t understand the implication that aggression is inherently more rigorous than praise when it’s obvious how much in this world is stacked against loving well.”
I also read Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei edited by Eliot Weinberger, who offers this read: “Dull, but fairly direct, [Soame] Jenyns’ only additions are the inevitable I and the explanatory slanting sun at evening. He is the only translator to prefer lichen to moss, though in plural form, the word is particularly ugly.” Weinberger said that because he could speak ill of the dead, you know?
In contrast, I’m doing this in real-time with real people who contribute their precious time and effort to the cause that is chogwa. I want to counteract the pervasive attitude that we have to compete and defeat one another in order to be recognized.
I’m really looking forward to our first-anniversary issue, themed “revisitation.” That’s all I’ll say for now!
STH: In the introduction to the first issue of chogwa, while referencing the differences between the various translations of Jin Eun-Young’s poem, you wrote: “When someone makes a noticeable compromise, I want to ask, What are you afraid of?” Is that something you often ask yourself when you are translating?
SJL: Someone called me ‘intrepid,’ which is funny to me because I’m anxious most of the time. I don’t want to disappoint the author/the editor/the typesetter/my friends/my colleagues/anyone who reads/the corn-on-the-cob vendor down the street.
I’ve gotten my share of people with institutional power criticizing my work to my face or screen, so I’m not just shadowboxing. I know their faces! I can hear their voices in my head! Earlier in my career, I used to think, “Oh, Professor XYZ will hate that. I better fix it.” Now I twirl my non-existent ponytail and ask, “And what about it?” (Then I lose that five-figure translation grant . . . )
Capitalism asks, what’s the budget? What can we afford to do? The thing is, I can pack so ‘well’ that the suitcase ends up being too heavy. Overweight baggage translates to chogwa hwamul in Korean. Excess: what’s beyond the limit. Whose limit? Not ours.
STH: You moved to Seoul with the express purpose of becoming a queer Korean literary translator. How has this move impacted and shaped your career trajectory?
SJL: That makes me sound so ambitious! I moved to Seoul in 2017 because living in the U.S. was draining the life out of me. My fully funded fellowship from LTI Korea was a life raft, though I knew that Korea wouldn’t be entirely safe for me either. I arrived with zero expectation that I’d be accepted, much less celebrated, by the field.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Anton Hur’s essay “A Lunar Sorority,” which gave me the confidence to translate queer Korean literature while attending LTI. This stranger had felt simultaneously so far and so near to me; he was published in this huge magazine with all these queer colleagues, yet his words tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a road. I couldn’t see where it ended, but the road was paved as far as I could see. I wasn’t alone.
Then Sophie Bowman, whom I’d met at the annual Korean literature translation workshop at Cal, invited me to dinner with her friend Anton! I still remember how nervous I felt in the presence of him, his tall husband, and our lamb skewers. For whatever reason, Anton took my sweaty self seriously and eventually inducted me into the Smoking Tigers collective. That made a huge difference in how I moved about in this field.
You’ve seen me perform this story about five times now, but thanks again, Anton!
STH: Speaking of performing, you participated in All Hail: The 2nd Drag King Contest in Seoul. Do you see any parallels between the art of drag and translation?
SJL: Drag pays better. I earned sixty thousand won (~fifty dollars) in tips for the three minutes I performed on stage.
For me, drag was exposure therapy in the most physical sense. My routine involved taking my man-pants off in front of a hundred-plus people. Once I did that to roaring applause—and those tips!—I was like, OK binch, you can read a couple of poems in public without dying.
Behind those three minutes of glory, there were indeed weeks of rehearsals with all the other performers. I took off that pair of pants over and over and over again. After a while, it felt weirder to be embarrassed by something I signed up to do.
Also, I’m blessed to have met so many queer artists and organizers in Seoul. Their chutzpah—to invite famous academics to their multidisciplinary events, study their queer Korean history and keep it going, and archive their own present while creating a space for women and genderqueer performers—is inspirational, full stop. Without their triumphant examples, I couldn’t have envisioned the Queer Bilingual Reading or chogwa for the translation community.
What’s funny is that I was way more nervous to host the QBR event fully clothed as I was. Three events later, I still get the nervous sweats. But I push through it because I know that people don’t want secondhand embarrassment; they want “the ooh-ahh-ahh sensation,” as Monique Heart puts it.
I don’t think everyone has to acquire a flamboyant persona in order to be a great performer; I consider Diana Khoi Nguyen as a premier example of that. I remain in awe of her oral performance of her very visual poetry.
Our attention and energy are limited even under ideal circumstances, from which we are collectively far. I want to thank everyone who comes to an event full of strangers or scrolls through a lengthy interview by presenting something like delight in return.
So J. Lee is the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021). They also make chogwa, a quarterly e-zine featuring one Korean poem and multiple English translations.
Sarah Timmer Harvey is a writer and translator currently based in New York. Sarah holds an MFA in writing and translation from Columbia University and, most recently, Sarah’s work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Gulf Coast Journal, and Cagibi.
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