found in translation

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Day 3, December Inspiration

As I read Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, the 2020 National Book Award winner for poetry, I thought about the way language, and specifically poetry, functions to illuminate ideas in ways unique to other genres, the ways poetry translates not just the poet’s thoughts but also those of others. When I picked up Choi’s collection I did not know she’s a translator by profession. Nor have I read her other collections.

DMZ Colony transcends traditional notions about poetic form. It’s more a collage of images and words than a poetry book. Still, I found Choi’s work compelling and inspirational. Choi’s publisher describes DMZ Colony as “evincing the power of translation as a poetic device.” A translator is a witness with the duty to report accurately and objectively what she witnesses.

Many lines in DMZ Colony spoke to me:

• The snow geese must have felt sorry for the homesick sparrow from a faraway place, for they dropped me a little line from the sky. (7)
• The language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to decipher. It’s practically a foreign language. (42)
• We live as foreigners, as translators. We translate everything, including what the Harrow” has written. We see the point of resrcribing everything written upon “the bodies”.

However, the collection includes few poems that look like traditional poems. Thus, I turned to The Academy of American Poets and Poetry Foundation to read more of Choi’s work. In “Woe Are You?” she writes,

It was hardly war, the hardliest of wars. Hardly, hardly. It occurred to me that this particular was hardly war because of kids, more kids, those poor kids. The kids were hungry until we GIs fed them. We dusted them with DDT….

Reading “Woe Are You?” and other Choi poems I noticed the cadence, her repetition of key words, such as hardly, meanwhile, somehow. We can incorporate these techniques in our poems, too.

Listen to and read “By the River of Formalin: Day Thirty-Three” from Autobiography of Death. Choi reads in English beginning at 2:25. The poem begins:

Brain inside the test tube is still alive
Looks like it’s writing poetry
It’s plunging into a blurry image
It’s opening the gate to grandparents’ house like a wind
The instant it runs into the embrace of dead grandmother….

Invitation to Write

Today I’d like us to think of ourselves as translators and find inspiration in the belief we, like Choi, can “witness and resist” through translation. In DMZ Colony Choi gives voice to orphans, political prisoners, and other survivors of war. We can choose to “translate” what we witness in our world. I took my inspiration both from reading some of Choi’s poetry I found online and from the recent debate over a local high school mascot.

• Choose a subject for translation
• Find inspiration in an image or text.
• Think of yourself as a translator, a witness, a reporter
• Compose and share your poem.

Glenda’s Poem

displayed behind the glass

the ram’s head
displayed behind the glass
had no say
in its fate.
It just sits
behind the glass
elevated on a box,
its body disemboweled
without legs or agency,
a mascot head welcoming
the children, now
Its offspring,
objects of reverse
anthropomorphism who—
like the trapped forest critter
the ram once was—
scurry from one
enclosure to another,
trapped in liminal space, a
time-honored tradition
preserved like the
taxidermied ram’s head
displayed behind the glass.

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