E.J. Koh’s memoir, The Magical Language of Others, was published in January 2020, but I read it in lockdown a few months later. Since March, I have read or listened to this book at least four times, each time encountering something else that makes me come back to it. Koh’s memoir is a coming-of-age story framed by translations of the letters her mother sent her from Korea, where she and Koh’s dad relocated for work. It tells the heartfelt story of a young Korean-American woman who comes to poetry and translation, to Japanese, and to a deeper understanding of her own languages, English and Korean. And she weaves into this story, with palpable sincerity and magnanimity, the stories of generations of women before her who survived the Japanese occupation, the Jeju massacre, and one abandonment after another. In this interview, she talks about avoiding seamlessness and translating war, wounding, and the seemingly impossible.
Ruwa Alhayek (RA): Has translation allowed you to inhabit your mother’s letters in a different way?
E.J. Koh (EJK): Translating my mother’s letters for me is inseparable from experiencing the vast distance between us in my youth—from the US to South Korea, between English and Korean—and the violence of when that distance suddenly collided to a close. I am living my way back toward the pain of being separated and reunited again. I am holding two strings at the same time. One is the mother who delivered her child. The other is the child who can deliver her mother. That is why I say if my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.
RA: If you were to issue a new translation of these letters, how do you think they might change?
EJK: I am in love with and feel deeply grateful for the work of translators. I’d be honored to see her letters translated again, by different translators. What occurs to me is how I leaned away from seamlessness, translation as if written in the historically dominant English, and hoped to let Korean remain—against erasure—choosing instead words with sound, syntax, and rhythm to keep pace with my mother’s voice running circles inside me. But I feel there is no one way, and the assumption of one is the failure to see what can be different and what can be changed.
RA: I was really inspired by the scene of your morning ritual in Japan where you sit in the coffee shop with the hanging vines from dawn until your classes start, memorizing ten pages from your pocket dictionary every day—is there something about that type of immersion that resembles the process of translation for you?
EJK: When I lived in Japan, I starved myself. I wouldn’t eat a proper meal until I could order in Japanese without error. My eating disorder entered my language, and discipline became a place where I could intellectualize my self-harm. I learned the language quickly but with shame and guilt—not opposites to but the very sources of pride. I used language to isolate myself. I say, Languages, as they open you up, can also allow you to close. Where before I depended on separation, now I move in the world by way of connection and humanity.
RA: Your memoir not only unfolds a history of traumas but also takes the reader gently along on a journey of healing. There are threads of collective grief and trauma that bind your stories and characters together, across both space and time, that invite into our consideration turbulent and tragic events in the Korean peninsula and their legacies, but also open up avenues for bonding and different expressions of love—other loves, lesser loves. What does it mean to write poetry and translate letters with this collective memory and trauma in mind?
EJK: In my research, I come across more about the people who committed historical atrocities than the people who suffered them. It led me to looking at public apologies, letters of apology, televised apologies. The word imagination arises often enough for me to notice. There are many kinds of losses that must be imagined. The loss of the dead and the loss for remaining alive. There is a braiding that happens between testimony and reparation, imagination and reconciliation. There is also the changing of names, from the location of the atrocity to the date when it took place, as a braiding. There are many kinds of truths from victims, scholars, perpetrators, but also the dead. There is the imagination to fathom a war and the imagination to live in its aftermath. It is possible to avoid difficult subjects, but they need not be avoided.
RA: You say in an interview that you want to read as you live—gently, and that you want to write toward love. What could it mean to translate gently, and toward love?
EJK: The interview talks about how reading critically is like using a paring knife—causing harm is no great feat while revealing light where unseen is. Or learning a book as one might learn a person. Instead of being a force upon the book, letting yourself be changed by what you encounter. This brings me to loving translation for its living, organic nature. Translation affected by languages and their bridged and braided histories, geography, and inheritance. Translators, like poets, as time mechanics. Residing in undecidability. Creating pathways to unsettled truths between countries. Not to pin down and narrowly determine but to reveal a new sense, broadening our understanding through loving perception. To translate war and wounding, to translate how we have died and how we could remain alive. To translate the connected, incandescent, worldly, ecstatic, ordinary. To translate with the element of surprise, remaining open to diversion, revision, and discovery. Translation of what appears to be impossible or endless as necessary.
RA: Finally, I took to heart the advice of the Irish professor and translator (Noah) in your memoir, who says that in order to be a great poet, you should translate. What advice do you have for aspiring translators, writers, and poets?
EJK: I shared a bit of writing advice for my younger self online. But I continue to add things in my mind. One thing I’d tell my younger self is to practice feeling secure in uncertainty. Often when insecure or lost within my work, I remind myself there are unlimited possibilities for how the work can surprise me and for what my work can still become. In this way, knowing can be limiting. What we can articulate tends to move away from the magic of the things we cannot.
E.J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others, the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize, and co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in literary translation and creative writing from Columbia University, and is completing the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.
Ruwa Alhayek is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, studying Arabic poetry and translation in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. She received her MFA from the New School in nonfiction, and is currently a social media manager at Asymptote.
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