DMZ Colony was written by writer and translator, Don Mee Choi. Is it silly to say that it could not have been written by anyone else?
… the torturer asked
… what if I smashed your head to bits?
… I said
… eee
… ideology1
History is ever arriving.2
I present to you a correspondence of certain grave significance. It’s written in a foreign language. No translators are available.3
To translate is, supposedly, to render one language into another. Don Mee Choi refers to the act of translation as an “anti-neocolonial” mode. How are we to understand this designation? Should we take it to mean that translation is an act of radical empathy, one which transcends boundaries, languages, race?
DMZ Colony is an unclassifiable text, and so it must be classified as Poetry.
Poetry: any text which one cannot easily make sense of.
Whereas some poetry collections establish a dichotomy between narrative and lyric, DMZ Colony proposes a different balancing act, one in which meaning is opposed to nonmeaning. This nonmeaning—which might be more accurately designated as unconventional methods of meaning-making—is most obvious in the book’s use of Korean script (meaningless to a Koreanilliterate reader) and English words spelled backward, but I suspect these maneuvers are only suggestive of a more subversive strategy.
they demanded meaning … meaning … yet meaningless4
I hope it is safe to say that Don Mee Choi the translator wants to be made sense of. If this is the case, Don Mee Choi the poet wants nothing of the kind. But we must not be so quick to distinguish these two roles. Proust says, “The duty and the task of a writer are those of a translator.”5 Choi herself says that, in this book in particular, “I have decided to foreground translation as a mode of writing.”6 In DMZ Colony, Choi is working at the limits of translation, in that space where it meets writing; and if we read closely, I suspect that this text—which is, by no coincidence, virtually untranslatable—will tell us a secret about both.
“Translation is a mode = Translation is an antineocolonial mode”: this equation, which appears in DMZ Colony and as the title of a collection of essays by Choi, rings in my head like a bell. I cannot come to grips with it. The neocolony, as Choi so vividly documents in her book through the example of South Korea, is the site of indirect hegemony and control. No blood needs to be spilt in the neocolony for it has, as Kwame Nkrumah writes, “all the outward trappings of international sovereignty”;7 it is controlled from the inside, as it were, by the economic, political, and cultural influence of the colonial power. How can we resist the comparison to a work of translation which, like the neocolony, appears as an autonomous text even though it derives its identity from a source text?
What is at stake in both of these projects, moreover, is intelligibility. It hardly needs to be said that translation is the act of rendering a text intelligible in another language. The neocolonizer, in an analogous way, must justify its presence to the neocolonial subjects and the international community—that is, it must translate its contingent assertions of power and influence into an intelligible logic, whether of “economic development” or, in the case of the U.S. in South Korea, “protection.”8 For both projects, it is imperative that the translation can stand on its own—that it appears autonomous and necessary.
The recent controversy surrounding how we treat translators is revealing on this topic. Jennifer Croft, in a recent article, argues that translators are integral creative collaborators in works of translation. They are not, she argues, quoting Etgar Keret, “like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.” Croft is fighting an industry that often refuses to credit and pay translators what Croft, and many others, believe they are worth.
