Jee Leong Kho's Lecture

 So far, the lecture series has been really surprising and refreshing since each week we get a completely new perspective and way of addressing translation. This week was no exception as Jee Leong Kho adopted the literary persona of Sam Fujimoto Mayer to give his lecture exploring the way translation can play a role within literary fiction. It was really interesting for me the connection Kho made between translation and images like immigration, transplantation, and invasive species. As related to immigration, one of the things that Sam Fujimoto Mayer (Kho) said was that as an Asian American translation becomes an intimate part of everyday life, something I can relate to since I constantly have to translate my thoughts from Spanish into English in order to communicate them. The notions of transplantation and invasive species are also very interesting to me because, on one hand, they underscore translation as a natural activity, and on the other, they portray translation as something threatening– something that could alter the environment of the target culture and maybe consume it (an image attuned to cannibal translation).

Another idea that I found intriguing was the fact that Kho uses translation as a way around cultural appropriation. I understand how translation in comparison to writing can provide an additional distance to a text and the source culture (since you are not the one producing the text from scratch); however, I remember that in TL 500 our professor once mentioned that translators are intrinsically cultural appropriators. When you translate you are working with the values and aesthetics of a culture that in some occasions may be alien to your own and this is why the debates surrounding the ethics of translation and issues like foreignization vs domestication are so important. This idea of cultural appropriation also made me think about the controversies surrounding who can translate who (like in the case of Amanda Gorman's translator). What I mean to say by this very long digression is that although translation can seem like a way to avoid cultural appropriation, I don't think this is completely accurate.  Overall, I really enjoyed Kho's lecture, his playfulness between reality and fiction, and the way he utilizes notions of translation within his works, and I think he raised many more interesting ideas that I hope we can discuss further in class.

– Lia

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