Jee Leong Koh: Intimacy and Translation

Jee Leong Koh: Intimacy and Translation

Dina Famin

 

Jee Leong Koh’s talk would have been surprising to those unfamiliar with or unprepared for Snow at 5 PM. The intimate acquaintance we made with Sam Fujimoto-Mayer for the first fifteen minutes of the lecture echoed sentences and sentiments from the book:

  • Haiku—and translation—is “freedom within constraint”
  • The image of “writing as a form of disguise, or, if you prefer, a clump of lies”
  • Haiku—or perhaps good haiku—“do not substitute text for the world, [but] rather treat text as part of the natural world”
  • “Writing is a form of propagation that translation helps to spread”
  • “Commentary is a form of translation”
  • Citing a French theorist: “to translate is to trace corporeally the same path the first body [of text] took”

Perhaps the most peculiar sentiment, emerging as part of the Q&A: “If I read a writer, I want to know his sex life.” Too far? My instinct says too far, yet when we discussed this at dinner, it turns out that I know a lot about my capstone writer’s sex life! And another comment from Sam’s voice, a metaphor I did not write down in full, or perhaps fully understand, but that now sits on the thirteenth line of my notes: “translation as f***ing???”

Jee Leong Koh highlights the intimacies of writing and translation. “You have to live in your character” when you create them, he says, but at the same time “you have to see around the edges.” This can easily be applied to translation as well, or to any practice when we take a text into ourselves. Unlike for Sam, writing is not an isolated practice to Koh, whether in workshops or his keen awareness of literary tradition, both in the modern national sense, and in his personal identification with the gay men’s sonnet tradition.

Snow at 5 PM is a work that will require more readings to peel away the layers of commentary and internal history. The book makes us think: what does it mean to translate? what does a translation do when it’s out there? In formatting his book to display the haiku and commentary on literal equal standing, neither dominating the other, Koh also challenges the supremacy allotted to the ever-elusive original, and counts the translator as an equal player in a text’s afterlife.

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