Posts filed under 'inherited trauma'

Translation Tuesday: from “A Minimal Unhappiness” by Carmen Verde

June 18, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Katie Shireen Assef

Unhappiness is not only a state of the spirit... No. Unhappiness is a place, a real, physical place, a dark room that we decide to stay in.

This Translation Tuesday, we are excited to present the English debut of Carmen Verde, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023 for her very first novel, A Minimal Unhappiness, which we excerpt here in Katie Shireen Assef’s impeccable translation. Verde’s narrator is a habitué of sadness and madness, an accustomed yet discerning sufferer. If unhappiness is a room, as she claims with some authority, then hers is lush-black, Gothically plangent, and filled with lugubrious relatives.

God is the Highest. God is the Most High.
Isn’t that terrifying?

 

***

In photographs we’re always sitting close together, my mother and I: she, pale, uneasy, with a look that seems to apologize for itself.

In those days, she still prayed to God that my bones would lengthen. God had nothing to do with it, though. If it took stubbornness for a girl not to grow, I had more than enough.

I never thought I was ugly. And I never doubted that I resembled my mother, even if I didn’t have her thin ankles, her elegant proportions. Ours was an elusive, an indecipherable resemblance: the sort of resemblance that pierces the heart of those who manage to recognize it.

 

***

In my five years of primary school, she came to pick me up every afternoon. The window of my classroom looked out onto the street, so that between my desk and the bench where she sat waiting, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred fifty feet as the crow flies. I was happy when I saw her on the other side of the glass, even if I was soon overcome by the fear—the terrible certainty, even—that she would decide to go and leave me there, alone. I never believed I had a right to my mother’s presence.

In winter, on windy days, the dust from the street would cling to her silk stockings, to her camel-colored coat, to her hair that was so straight and smooth it seemed like velvet. On the first warm days in June, she would stand beneath the shade of the linden tree at the center of the piazza. If she stayed, I told myself, it meant she loved me. I couldn’t see her from where I sat at my desk (the shutters were closed to block out the sun), and so the fear would slowly build up inside me until, five minutes before the lesson ended, I had lost all hope of finding her. And yet there she would be, still in the same spot. Yes, Sofia Vivier was a good mother.

READ MORE…

Writer and Translator E.J. Koh Explores the Bridged and Braided Histories of Language

August 23, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

If my mother’s letters could sleep, my translations would be their dreams.

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. READ MORE…