Conversation with Jennifer Hayashida

­ Jen4_mixdown_transcription 1:01:07 8600 words 13 pages

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Femke 00:00 So our interest has been in trying to find protocols and practices of what we call courageous sharing. So ways of distributing, disseminating and sharing materials, while at the same time, taking care of what happens when things move between contexts when they that can be in in place, it can be in the community that holds the material. But it can also be in time, sometimes things you might take something on that has been done many years ago, in a different context, that's also a different context that produces some reasons for being attentive to what happens when the sharing is done. We are coming from a practice of open content of copyleft, of a politics of sharing that is really trying to go against the conventional idea of that copyright copyright has is that an author is a legal entity, a citizen recognized in front of the law, who, as an individual, has the right to say or not, what happens to the materials that they are, that they say they have produced. And the title of this afternoon we chose for a reason First Times Do Not Exist, because are convinced that this is not a helpful way of dealing with cultural production. We're interested in trying to practice really seriously something we all know, that when we make something we always remake, we always reuse we always base ourselves on the things that have gone through us. And the things we make go through others again. So how do you do that? That is the question in our project, right?

Eva 02:01 So yes, we are now super excited that we are in conversation with Jen. Jen works as a translator, and in one of our initial conversations, Jen, you said, it would be interesting to think through what it means to translate a living author [in comparison to translating someones work who has already passed] because with a living author you have the opportunity to be in dialogue.

Jen 02:28 So I'm Jen, I'm, I'm a translator, and I'm a PhD candidate for the equivalent in artistic research. I'm also strangely sleepy, but I'll wake up. So I think it's important to say that these questions and this conversation is in some ways, a continuation of the conversation that we had on lime, two months ago. Yeah, roughly. Yeah. The questions that came up, then are sort of the questions that animate this discussion. And I think it's interesting because just that I mean, I work as a translator, I grew up between languages. I'm born in the US, but I grew up in Sweden, like, I've sort of spent my entire life between Swedish and English. I'm also not racialized as Swedish. And so that has been sort of the third way that I've navigated language is through my process of racialization. And moving between contexts were in California where my father lived, I had one identity, racially speaking. And then in Sweden, I had another one. And sort of translating those identities is how I think about translating language. And so it's just important for me to say that when I, a big part of my research has to do with the way that context informs how one engages with language, what kind of knowledge one brings to bear in the act of translating. So if I've, you know, I've studied French, I don't speak French by any stretch of the imagination. Could I translate a sentence of course, but you know, my relationship to French is academic, at best, my relationship to American English. You know, it's a language that I've been subjugated, it's also what has socialised me. And as a result, when I go to English or American English, there's a way that that socialisation is the knowledge that I draw upon in translating. When I say that I'm a translator, usually I get the question, oh, what do you translate? And when I say, Oh, I translate poetry and people say, Oh, that must be so hard. And that's kind of how it goes. And it's true. I translate poetry. Historically. I've always translated I'm just give a little background from Swedish to English, increasingly together with on Andjeas Ejkson, who's, who was my colleague at HDK-Valand, who's now just my friend, we translate together from English, American English to Swedish. That, I think is where this question becomes where there's a case study to respond to this question in some ways about what it means to work with a living author. Because I think when you asked me to participate in this event, what to me is so interesting is this idea of translation as reuse. And this idea of there not being an original, which is something that I've explored in a more literary context. But one of the things that's emerged in the work with Andjeas is that we work, we work with a Korean American poet, who's a poet and translator, who in turn works with a Korean poet. And in that, it's just the most sort of precise case study I have. So we translate a poet whose name is Don Mee Choi. And she translates a poet her name is Kim Hyesoon, from Korean to English. And then Andjeas and I also translate Kim Hyesoon and we do that as a so called "relay translation". So we translate a translation, we translate Don Mee's English translation of Kim Hyesoon. So it's not an unusual form of translation, but it's considered sort of dirty. Some people actually call it a kind of dirty or contaminated form of translation, kind of for exactly the reasons that you would probably think it's great, because it distributes the author in ways where authorship becomes negotiated in a really explicit way. And the way this particular structure came about is that Kim Hyesoon was asked by a Swedish publisher, if they could translate her work into Swedish. And she said, use the English translation because she has a very deep artistic and political solidarity with her translator, Don Mee Choi. So that's this is the American English translation that I can pass around. That came out a few years ago from New Directions in the US. And if you look at the copyright now, I can't remember what it says. Can you see? Who has the copyright now? Don Mee? Kim Hyesoon still has the copyright. That's so interesting.

Femke 07:41 And then the second, Don Mee has also a copyright. There are two copyrights.

Jen 07:51 Yes. So the Yeah, but the first one is probably has a earlier date. That's the original. And then the translation has Don Mee. If you look at the Swedish translation of Don Mee's, translation, Andjeas and I have the copyright. Right, so it's been transferred in three steps. But what's interesting is that in the actual work of translating, we're obviously dealing with Don Mee's translation. So we're translating a translation, there's a displacement of a displacement. And there's also this displacement of the author. There's a displacement of the singular. There's a displacement of the original. And I think, I guess the only point I really have is that, you know, this is possible, because it was the will of the author. If we had done this on her on our own and gone rogue and not asked Kim Hudson, there would have been a huge ethical problem. But it was her initial sort of request that we operate that way. And so to me, that kind of that kind of really dirty translation. There's a poetics that I think is really interesting in terms of those displacements that take place linguistically. Because we're also operating between. Well, the English, the Korean to the English is probably the most sort of Stark movement of the language because you're, the movement between American English and Swedish is not as grammatically or syntactically complicated, but in terms of what Don Mee had already done. There are ways that Korean operates that she had to negotiate that helped us in many ways, but the point is just that those displacements are to me artistically and politically interesting. But that also has to do with the fact that they already have a very well articulated kind of political and political poetic solidarity that makes the ethical sort of joints of the work. Okay.

Eva 10:02 Could you say a bit more about displacement? How you understand the moment of displacement?

Jen 10:14 I mean, there's a multitude of displacements. There's the linguistic displacement of from Korean to American English. There's the fact of I mean, Don Mee is a poet in her own right. And, sorry, I feel like I'm a salesperson. On television. So we translate Don Mee as well. Andjeas and I, and but then we're translating her from American English to Swedish. So there's no relay, but her practice in turn is kind of contaminated already, because she borrows from a multitude of sources in her own poetry. So she borrows from her father's photo archive, news propaganda. So that's already contaminated. So it's already a kind of translation. So when I say displacement, I think what I'm, for me, at least what I'm talking about is a plural displacements. So there's the movement from Korean to American English, which necessitates a bunch of linguistic displacements in terms of pronouns and verb forms, and how the length the poetics of the language, how it functions. But then there's, of course, the fact of Don me's intervention as a translator. So it's all her interpretation. And then that's an additional, because we're reading Don Mee's reading of Kim Hyesoon. So we're also displaced in some ways by virtue of reading somebody else's translation. There is also the third or fourth, I've lost track displacement, which has to do with the movement, not simply into Swedish, but also into Sweden. How does it work that is about that is a critique in many ways of how the sweet or how the South Korean Nation State operates. How does that work resonate in another state context, where South Korea has a different status than it does in North America, for example. So how does this work get read through the filter of the Swedish welfare state Sweden's history, with South Korea and the Korea's more generally? Swedish understanding, or complete misunderstanding of like East Asia, East Asian politics, East Asian subjectivity. And so I think that that displacement is also very interesting to us in terms of thinking about how the dirty translation, the sort of triangulation of the dirty translation becomes a fruitful model for thinking geopolitically about translation and how those different nodes become like meaningful ways to think about translation as this continuous kind of unfolding or displacement. But I think I mean, I'm talking about this very specific example, I think that those displacements are always taking place. Even in a translation of a blockbuster novel, I just think that they're, they're being kind of obscured or alighted, because, within sort of mainstream literature, there is a desire to think that you're accessing the original, when you're reading a translation, that a good translation somehow gives you a portal into something, but that, to me is just the fiction. This just happens to be case study where the work flow and the material objects concretize. What I think is always happening, they're just explicit than this work.

Femke 14:15 You spoke about the solidarity politics of the authors or the poets in this in this working relation. But is there any way that you check or somehow make explicit what the limits are of the dirtiness of this translation like how does that work?

Jen 14:37 What do you mean by "limits"?

Femke 14:41 You said that because of the position of the different people in this working relation, that it was okay. In other environments, work relationships it might not be okay. So I'm curious how you know and check that it is okay.

Jen 15:12 I mean, I can only really point to this particular instance, and also sort of the working relationship that we have with these two people, where it does have to do with this sort of continuous process of consent where it's like, but that's kind of how... It's funny, I've never thought about it that way. I've just thought it, like when I'm translating, and this has to do with the "living author" problem, or solution or situation, where, you know, a lot of the work of translating somebody who's alive and who wants to be a part of the process involves emailing them and saying, asking questions about word choices, and stuff like that, which I realise is also a way of continuously affirming that, you know, is this okay with you? But you know, obviously, in the case of Don Mee and Kim Hyesoon, it was a process of like, we never had contact with Kim Hyesoon directly about word choices, for example. And it's not that she was disinterested, she just knew that the person who was the most sort of engaged with the work translationally was Don Mee. So Don Mee was like the gatekeeper in some ways, but she is also a very non gatekeeper person. So she describes the process of translating Kim Hyesoon as being in a state of trance. Which means that asking her questions about word choices often meant her saying, I don't remember. It's the fog. But I think that's kind of how the checking of the limits happens. But I mean, part of what prompted this question when we talked about it the first time is that I, for the first time in my life, I'm working with a dead writer, whose language is wild. And who has, who made whose poetics involve, like disruptions of how Swedish operates in many ways. And being loyal with or mimicking those disruptions without this person's consent is to me, ethically, tricky, not because I think I'm necessarily overstepping my bounds. But I think there's also a kind of, there's obviously an artistic value to having a dialogue and being able to work out solutions together. And so not having that kind of togetherness with that person means that I've had to turn to people who are very committed to and loyal with her project of me, she wrote specifically about vestibular them. And so finding writers and scholars who are committed to her depictions of Västerbotten also means this kind of dispersal in some ways, because then I'm reading the work, both on my own, but I'm also reading it through them and their readings become part of it. But the negotiations of those limits are very much subject to these other four people's ethics. And what they would consider the limits of decision making. And that has to do largely with their conceptions of what translation is. Is it a transfer? Is it a decanting? Or is it this more sort of artistically wild process? And so the limit itself is determined by what you believe translation is or should be in the first place.

Eva 19:08 One of our questions was when reuse is happening, like where text is transferred from one language, from one nation state, one context to the other? What do we have to watch out for? What issues to be attentive to? Because you use the word loyalty and that's really interesting.

Jen 19:27 I'm looking at my note because I had a note about this.

Femke 19:30 I would like to come back at some point also to being in trance as a way to somehow ready for reuse. I think this is maybe think about what it what it means to be in trance and how how do you become in trance? What are elements to pay attention to or to watch out for or be careful with when you enter into a process of reuse, in this case through translation?

Jen 20:07 I mean, this is something that I talked to my staff or the students I work with about a lot. Because to me, it's a temporal question, which is sort of at the heart of what you titled this event? Because I think one of the hazards, or I don't want to be that absolute, but this thinking that you're the first person entering the story. I mean, this question is, to me, incredibly present now: do you call something a defence or do you call it an attack? So that to me is a way of thinking about the translators sort of position in relation to the text? If the translator imagines that they are the first person there, in a sort of settler way, then that to me is something... The same is true of the author. Obviously, if the author has an errand {?} in writing, where they want to claim that they are the first person there, then that to me is something that is inherently suspicious. And as a translator, I think – this is not really answering your question – but I think, to be very mindful of the fact that you're never the first person there, and to treat the language and the, the claims of the text with that kind of trans-historical awareness. Most translators for whom this is how they make their living. I mean, I'm lucky right now, because it's not how I make a living. It's how I do my research, you don't get to choose, you just do the work, you're underpaid, you're undervalued. And your task is to be invisible. I think 99% of all translators can't interrogate their work, even if they wanted to, on that level. Like I have a choice. And that's a very privileged position. And in that position, I can say, I don't want to work with texts that make claims. Unless I think that I can instrumentalized them in ways that counteract those claims. It's a very sort of self aggrandizing answer. But I just think that there's a, there's a way that as a translator, you always have to know that you are not the first person on the scene.

Eva 22:35 It'll be interesting to hear a bit more about how you select what you translate, because you just mentioned, you're in the privileged position not to have to make a living. Because translation is also giving visibility within a context where the text might not have been written in.

Jen 22:55 Well, it is, but I think there's also I mean, I'm going through this right now where I've had sort of an ontological thing. But it's like, we can we can make that claim about literature and translation, because there is literature and translation. But for every book that's translated, there's probably 100 books that aren't. And the selection process, whereby books get translated, is determined by a largely North American and Western European sort of literary capitalist structure that makes decisions based on largely Imperial and colonial desires. And so there are certain ways, there is an apparatus that makes things possible. But that apparatus is also sort of like the first person on the scene thing, that apparatus is predetermined, by deeply sort of violent and racist and classist claims to exceptionalism. And so I think we know what exists. But there's a very, very strong machine that also prevents other work from coming out. And I just think it's, you know, translation is something that makes something possible, but there's a stronger machine that is like, the publishing industry and, and that machine represents certain desires that are not coming from the place, but where the work is, from, so to speak, for Colonial desires, basically. I talked to a friend of mine who works in publishing in North America about this, I'm just there ways that translation is also about reproduction, and reproducing fantasies of others. I think in Sweden, for example, we're I think it's almost like 60% I always look at Nils as if you're an expert on this very question, but I think it's about at least half of the literature published in Sweden, and I'm looking at Sofia, is translated. And to me that's deeply interesting, because in the US, it's 4%. And I think that in and of itself says something about the fantasies that are in circulation in various places, but also I think the counter fantasies and what sort of possibilities there are to object to these fantasies in translation. There's also sort of the data around who translates in the US, they did a survey of the American literary translators Association. And I think it was like 80% 86%, or something of the translators identified as white, for example, and 70, or something percent identified as upper middle class. I mean, there are certain ways that the the people doing professional translation in North America in particular, in different ways potentially embody a kind of desire that or desire or epistemological sort of gaps that inform what gets translated or how it gets translated. I don't know exactly what it looks like in Sweden, but just anecdotally, I don't know if it's that much different.

Femke 26:19 So can we go back to the...

Jen 26:23 ...trance question?

Femke 26:24 Yeah. I mean, we were trying to figure out like practices of reuse. And so when you said that I thought, Okay, this is maybe a sort of state of being that would be helpful for doing reuse in reasonable or ethical way.

Jen 26:41 But I think I need to not necessarily backtrack, but I think one thing that's important to say is that I think my interpretation, and I've talked to Don Mee about this a little bit, trance doesn't mean that she's outside capital, or that she's outside, outside empire, or even outside language, necessarily, I think for her what it means. This is a very strong sort of speculation. So I want to be very clear that it's entirely speculative. But I think what it means in her case, and this also has to do with what I know about their relationship with each other, is that they have a shared history. And that's the trans {?}, a shared history that has to do with a relationship to the South Korean state apparatus, for example, and also a deep commitment to feminist experimental South Korean poetry. I think that's the place of trance {?} for her, but it's definitely like not outside capital now that not outside empire, not outside language, perhaps outside the regime of English because a lot of her sort of, of Don Mee poetics has to do with disrupting kind of the normative functionality of American English. So that might be where the sort of tranceness {?} is situated. But I think I think it Yeah, I think it has to do with like memory and being in memory, corporealy, and like, being in the memory with Kim Hyesoon poetry. I thought that I don't know. I mean, but it's how she talks about it when she talks about it, like both in terms of what she is able to remember. But what she isn't able to remember, does seem to have to do with where, where they meet up experientially, but also geneologically, what they share and, um, their shared commitments to like anti-imperial feminist, what she calls, you know, anti Neo colonial violence and South Korea and I think that's where I think it's in that sort of oppositional labour that the trans {?} is situated. So I guess in some ways, that is like the, the suggestion or the proposition of the work is, it's in the opposition, but the trans can be kind of imagined. Sounded pretty nice. Right? You look pretty happy. I'm pretty happy. I think that's actually useful. For me, at least Yeah. So yeah.

Femke 29:21 I mean, for me, it also resona tes with loyalty. Like you speak about commitment and loyalty. What is that loyalty for you like to be loyal?

Jen 29:39 To be kind. No, I think kindness is a big part of production {?}. Feel like I'm talking to my kids kind and to be honest. Um, nobody, I think, you know, one of the things that Don Mee and Kim Hyesoon were Right talk about when they, there's an interview at the back in the back of the English edition. And they talk about when they first met, and they were translating. For a feminist organisation in South Korea, I can't remember the name of it right now, I'm very bad at that kind of thing. And these were women who in who had experience to various forms of violence as a result of war, war and war crimes, and the sort of shared project of translating their testimonials, both transcribing them, but then also translating them into English. And I think that kind of loyalty that has to do with like, mobilising your knowledge or experience in an anti Neo colonial way, as opposed to like a colonial way, I think that is a kind of loyalty that, that I'm deeply committed to, but I've sort of learned that from their working relationship. But I think the other kind of loyalty that's interesting to me in terms of translation is that and this comes up in my teaching, but also in my working relationship with en js, is that where we do the hardest, and kind of most loyal work is where we don't know things. And so like, English is my first language I if I had to arrange a hierarchy, English is my first language, Swedish is my sort of second language, he is very much a Swedish speaker, he's he's he has no lack of confidence with the Swedish language, but he is not His English is not his first language. But we meet in our respective linguistic weaknesses. And that's where we do the most work. And I think that kind of loyalty of meeting, where we know the least, is more interesting. And some are as interesting as the other transfer like with Don Mee, and the testimonials, because that has to do with having a kind of expertise, that that may help somebody else. But I think the other kind of loyalty of assertive meeting and the weak spot, be it linguistic, or you know, could be anything is, you know, being loyal with someone, even when they have their pants down, is it's really hard. But I think it fruit for us, it's been really been a really productive way of working is to sort of acknowledge that as a place to be and stay, as opposed to a place to get away from. I also think that this is just my own opinion. But I think that it's very easy as a translator, to automatically think that you're supposed to be loyal with the potential reader. And I think that there are certain ethics to that, depending on the texts that are important to take into account. I don't I can feel like I said, I feel like I'm setting a trap for myself. But I think there are ways that being loyal with the sort of poetics of the text, depending on what the text is, is, is for me, that's what's at stake is discerning what the how the text operates and what its claims are through how it operates. And then being loyal with that. I mean, when I teach, I'm also a proponent of disloyalty. So it's it's I think it depends on what text you're working with, and what reader you have in mind

Eva 33:45 Wat would disloyalty mean?

Jen 33:47 I mean, it sort of goes back to that other question about like a text that makes claims around being the first, I've talked to my former secondary supervisor about this a lot. I think there are ways that you as a translator, I not necessarily always through footnoting, or through a translators note, although I think those are fantastic forms. But I think also through the act of translation to sort of, in your word choices signal that, that the claims being made are not necessarily robust. But the claims that the text is making but the translation, that the translation would be an active dialogue with the original, the text that purports to be the original, so as to make clear that the translation is simply a documentation of a process of examination, as opposed to producing another thing that's supposed to represent the original. I'm sorry, I feel like I'm getting all snared into my own language. I think a bad translation is really interesting, for example, like what is a bad translation? There's a, I don't want to point to that review, because it's just an embarrassing review, not a my work, of course. But to me, it's very interesting to think well, what is a bad translation. And everybody in this room, I think would have a different definition of what that is. And so I think when we claim to aspire to a good translation, I think we should be as open to the fact that that means different things to all of us. To me a good translation is a translation where you can see that it's a translation where you read it and you stumble. But for many people, that is a terrible translation, you shouldn't stumble, you shouldn't trip over the first language. But to me, the translation is the kind of contaminated artefact because the first thing being translated wasn't the first thing. It was already contaminated when it came as the original. So it's like it was broken. Andjeas wrote about this and the translators note too. That book, where the the text is a... the translation is already a ruin. But it was a ruin to begin with. So you're just walking through the ruin of a ruin. And that's, I think there's a way that I think a good translation tells you that it's a ruin, but the thing was never whole to begin with. It sounds sort of vague. And I think I could point to ways that we've tried to do that in that book, and in this book, but I think that has to do with like, not trying to hide the displacement, like the awkwardness of language, or, like one of the things we write about is that Swedish poetic conventions, which has to do with the way Swedish operates, I think, in a way, use the definitive form of many nouns. So it's the tree, the bird, the woman, the table, which has to do with the ending that signals but it's the definitive form. So it's an EM ending or ET. But in English, it's that awful word, "the", which is everywhere. And in American poetic American English poetic conventions, it's off, it's more common to use the indefinite form. In Korean, the definite and indefinite are signalled in different ways that are not necessarily attached to the noun. So in Don Mee's, English translation of Kim Hyesoon, she often uses the indefinite form. And in American English, that works, because that's already a pre existing kind of norm. In Swedish. That becomes very strange because everything is indefinite. There's a mythological Princess, for example, in this she's Princess, there's table there's rabbit, there's, but in Swedish, it's a little bit odd. But it's a way to signal that we didn't try to translation theory term for it is we didn't domesticate the text. And to us, that's very important, because it's a way to signal that this is a translation, and we're not going to pretend that it's not a translation, we're not going to domesticate it, we're not going to be loyal with readerly expectations. And we're not going to try to obscure the fact that it's a translation because to us that has a political and poetic purpose. It's the same thi ng with {KIERKE} {? } the translation of "Hardly War" there. There are other ways that Don me uses American English to signal that there's Korean behind the American English, because that's ultimately kind of her first language. And so there's sort of cracks or she refers to it as a kind of fraying of the language which I've since understood that she is also sort of borrowed from Spivak and that that fraying gets to stay. Or not just that it gets to stay, but that it has a poetic and political purpose. And that's where my sort of frayed relationship to Swedish gets put to use because I still don't always hear what's right or wrong. And so to the greatest extent possible, Andjeas and I have had to work with like, my kind of, you know, ninth grade Swedish, to try to be loyal with the phrasing and text, which sometimes makes it sound like it's a bad translation, because there are things that are incorrect, or they're their edges that we haven't smoothed out. It's the same thing in this book. The one of the the only review we've gotten for that so far. The Swedish review or critic said that we had worked hard to preserve the "lands Lassa" {?}. How would you translate that word? flatness? My understanding is that it wasn't a compliment. But that had to do with like not trying to beautify the language without

Nils 37:53

Sheen? Yeah, yeah.

Jen 37:54 And I think that it's true, we did work very hard to do that. But it's an interesting Swedish word. But I think again, it also has to do with the fact that her language, or her poetics, she's very invested in that kind of {glanzlos} here that, like, the language is very clearly from elsewhere, it's being deployed for poetic purposes. But that doesn't necessarily make it poetry. If that makes sense. There's a very strong sort of documentary quality to the work as well. I mean, she refers to them as poems, but I don't know if she would call it poetry. I don't know, of all this is to say that I think that we're sort of,

Nils 40:58 I actually think it's a pretty profound word in the context, because it could be translated to lungs could also be translated to semblance. Oh, you're right, as in shine, which is also a static notion, right?

Eva 41:17 So I'm looking at the clock, we have at least 15 minutes or more if we want left. And I also want to open questions to the floor. But I have one question, which I want to pose before. And this is like when you sort of flipped through the box and said, okay, the copyright is here, the copyright is here. And you, you and Andjeas have the copyright for the Swedish translation, how do you feel about it? what does it mean to have the copyright?

Jen 41:49 I have to shut my eyes a little bit, just to think. I translated a blockbuster ones, from Swedish to English. This book sold! I think they sold it to, at this point, probably 30 different countries for translation. It was a novel, obviously, it wasn't a book of poetry. And I worked with him through an age a literary agency. And when you do that kind of work, that was for money. So when you do that kind of work as a translator, the agency ends up with the copyright. It's a it's a short contract, because you have no rights as a translator. So they don't have to say that much. But you do give up all rights to like audio, film, anything, you give it all to the agency and the agency in turn, keep selling it. I think one of the things that's interesting about being a translator to English, is that, in that situation, I had no claims to the work whatsoever, which obviously has financial implications. There's been a sort of big discussion among American, North American and Western European translators, in particular, about having the translators name on the cover of the book, which to me is just a substitute or like a way of getting around the fact that the translator still doesn't have any sort of legal or financial claims to the translation after the work of translation is done. But it was interesting to me in that situation that a, I know that my translation was actually the basis for a few of the other translations that were relay translations, which is how it often goes when you translate to English. Because not everybody speaks Swedish, shocking. But I'm so used to having that kind of abject role. And I don't mean that in a victimised way, I just mean, like, actually abject, because I translate poetry most of the time, where it's true, I have the copyright, but it's such a devalued form, in some ways that I have the copyright to something that nobody wants. Sorry, this is a terrible thing to say about poetry. I don't actually feel that way about poetry. So my feeling about it is sort of tender, because I have the copyright to something that in and of itself – I don't want to say that it exists outside the market, because nothing does, but it has this kind of precarious status. So I obviously don't safeguard the copyright, nor do the authors I work with. So I think the question, the concept of copyright when it comes to poetry in translation, the sort of singularity of copyright gets up ended by virtue of what the copyright is connected to, because the thing that is copyrighted have such a sort of uncertain status to begin with? It's it's not the same thing as me not having the copyright to the translation of this blockbuster, for example. And so to me, copyright signals so many different things. And when it comes to conceptual poetry and translation, and this is like the heart of the question of today's event, in some ways is like, I don't know if the answer when it comes to this kind of work, for example, is that there not be copyright? I don't know if that's actually the question or if the question is poetry, like who, who claims and owns poetry and takes care of poetry, versus like, is copyright actually, in the case of conceptual poetry in translation, a way of taking responsibility versus claiming responsibility versus claiming ownership, I guess that's what I'm saying, tending to something, versus capitalising off of it. You know, I think those are very different things. I understand the sort of legal and, but you know what I but you know, what I'm saying, I just think that depending on what the copyright is attached to, and this also has to do, as you, you and I have talked about, like, who is the author whose rights are being safeguarded through copyright. But I think that also has to do with like, Who wants to take responsibility for a thing, I just want to say one quick thing, which is to do that I did another project, where I think translation is a super helpful way to think about the opposite of what I'm talking about, which is I worked with copyrighted material that was copyrighted by a North American entity that shall remain nameless. And I was in a interesting conversation about the legality of my work, the legal status, and to what extent translation as a way of displacing the text from its copyrighted status, and how far do you have to displace it in order for it to not be traceable? And for there to not be an infringement? I don't have an answer to that question. I don't think that I answered it. But I think it's an interesting way to also think about the relationship between translation and copyright. To what extent is translation, a method of distancing something that is in copyright infringement or in violation of copyright? Sort of absolving the text of its violation, somehow. But according to the lawyers I've spoken with, you know, it has to be illegible as the thing that it was. But then the question, and this I think, is where someone like Don Mee or the question of dirty translation becomes really interesting is what if the text doesn't make claims to legibility in the first place, like Don Mee and her poetry, for example. I used an extremely sort of didactic text, which makes deep claims to legibility, but I tried to make it as illegible as possible.

Eva 48:10 I'd love to quickly come back to this word responsibility, like copyright and responsibilities. So you were looking for words that describe your relationship, what the copyright means. So you are taking responsibility for this printed translation? But has this also to do with custodianship or having control over it? Because that would sort of counteract your dirty translation chain, it could just wander somewhere else, or do you feel protective about it?

Jen 48:43 I mean, I think protection and control. I've been in enough psychotherapy to think that I understand the difference between the two, but I think, but I but I think this goes back to the consent question, where, you know, we're in continuous dialogue. It's very strange to me. I don't know, I can't say that, because I don't know for sure. But I you know, it's because we're in continuous dialogue. And so, you know, I would never claim to control this translation, because every single decision that Andjeas and I make about its distribution, or dissemination, or how it will exist in the world is in dialogue with Don Mee. It's like, we're her ambassadors to use it weird diplomatic analogy, in Sweden. But yeah custodian also implies that she's not capable of taking care of it on her own, which she is. I mean, I think, sorry, this is like a deeply problematic thing to say. But I think in some ways, the copyright and the fact that she has the copyright in English, there's a kind of solidarity in that. But again, it's such a deeply problematic framework. I understand that it's like a dirty kind of solidarity in a way, but it's like, but I think, again, I think it has to do with like the status of poetry. If she was Knausgard, and I was his translator, I think there are different ways that that prove the sort of the already inscribed hierarchies of mainstream literature would completely undermine what I'm saying right now. Because that like huge machine of like mainstream literary capital, means that no, of course, the translator is not in solidarity through copyright with the author. But I think because of this much more kind of horizontal or whatever you want to call it relationship means that the copyright signifies something a little bit other than otherwise than what it normally would. But my understanding is that when it comes to poetry, in particular, in Sweden, copyright generally falls to the writer. But I think, depending on the status of the writer, there are certain ways that copyright moves around a little bit, especially then if you have an agent and an agency. But yeah, I don't know, I'm just interested in this idea from the vantage point of dealing with a form that is not that wanted in the first place. You know, I just think that it does something with the meaning of copyright. Ram is nodding, so I'm happy with my answer.

Femke 51:42 Are there any questions she would

Jen 51:45 pass this around? Sorry, I just I don't know why I have so much like, thanks to artefacts. Perhaps

Nils 51:52 one could ask a question that wouldn't that one would not be me. But I'm just imagining someone, perhaps. Yes. But the decision is to not to work within a given forms of circulation and distribution, because an alternative would be no copyright, and not work with conventional as a very small part of the conventional circulation of literature. From that, that's, that's not an alternative. Is it?

Jen 52:33 You mean for something like this or like this? No. Well, I mean, it was. I don't know. I feel like Don Mee become such a weird figure in this. She's also not here to speak for herself. But, I mean, again, this is sort of like what we talked about when we talk on the on the internet. She debuted she's a Korean American writer, not writing and her first language, displaced in various ways through war. I'm like, super oversimplifying this. Active debuts when she's 49. As a person of colour in a North American literary market, that's just like bananas. And then with her second book, which is this book, "Hardly War". And then her third book she like. She's just widely recognised with like a number of awards and the National Book Award, and she won a MacArthur Fellowship, which is one of the most prestigious awards you can get in the United States. And so yes, then it's not an option really, because she, to me, there's an ethics attached to the fact that she's a person of colour, she works with a small press, I mean, one of the biggest small presses, but it's still an independent press "New Directions". And so yeah, to say that she would then not have a legal claim to her own work, or that her work in the face of that apparatus that eats everything, would to me be ethically problematic! I don't know. And so I think that there's a way that to demand of a person in that position, that they give up their claims to their work. In the face of a machine that eats everything, to me is not more ethical, necessarily. I think the thing that's also sort of just anecdotally funny, is that she has copyright issues inscribed in this book, because her father's footage is owned, I think, feel like I'm her father's footage is copyrighted. He was a war photographer, which I already mentioned by I think, at CBS. So there are ways that the material in the book has a sort of uncertain legal status, which it is not, it has nothing to do with your question necessarily, except that there's a kind of, it's embedded in the work itself. Also, because there are various citations of famous work in the book that are, they're cited at the end. But has she paid for the right to, you know, to use the imagery in particular? Unclear. But yeah, just to rewind, I just think I think that depending on the position of the person, with the title, author, I just, I just think that it's the demand to interrogate the meaning of copyright, I think, needs to be very specific, depending on the person and work at hand. I mean, you also wrote about this in the description to the today. But I think, you know, it's very easy to make those sort of broad sweeping claims of the sort of utopian other time when there is no such thing. But I think that like, just to sort of wrap it up, I guess, is, I think that goes back to the thing that we talked about in the beginning, that implies that there's no prehistory to this question, that, that goes beyond the question of copyright, which has to do with like colonialism and Empire and, and racial capital. And I think that those things predate as far as I understand it, copyright. And so that mechanism is like a symptom of something. But it's not necessarily the thing that's going to solve the problem unnecessarily not to say that it's not worth interrogating, and imagining other models fobut I think what's inscribed in it, copyright isn't the first thing on the scene, I guess.

Ram 57:12 Thank you. Because I, you, you articulated it really, really well, I think I don't

Jen 57:20 even remember what I said, No, I said that there was a recording.

Ram 57:25 And appreciate the dilemma. Because I'm also like, because the, the idea that the first times don't exist, I'm linking that to the project of colonialism and, and the very idea of space and time and where it begins. And if time and space begins, at a very particular juncture, in the project of colonialism. Then to sort of reach a point where now, people sort of, in marginal spaces are responding to that claim of time and space, that it starts here, and everything is framed from this point onwards, and to then sort of have that timespace get fuzzy, and then the anxiety that it produces, because it's also through these frameworks that whatever little bit of protections that one can have, is having. And I think this is exactly why I think the way you articulated that it has to be attached to where, it has to be attached to what material it is. It has to there has to be attached to whom? Precisely so. And that's why I thought you summed it up very, very well. I just wanted to say that.

Jen 58:57 But I think that that work specification is in and of itself, like an oppositional work. Yeah. Because that's not a work that that like the colonial apparatus, or the Imperial apparatus does, right? It doesn't specify in that way, it specifies other positions.

Ram 59:18 You're also because even so I'm just thinking of like a lot of situations where the state that has come to be in a lot of post colonial societies, and the analogue legal framework that we have, it's still informed by colonial practices, a lot of it has been carried on. So and that has framed discussions and legal framework around ideas of property, copyright, all of that. And, and so the struggle for people sort of in marginal spaces a Is that they, they fight the state, they fight that framework, but they also have one recourse in that framework. So it's a bind that they are constantly navigating and struggling with. So therefore, like, like, I'm going to oppose, but only to an extent because I also know that if I dismantle the framework, I am the one who will be paying the price, most more than anybody else. So therefore, this insistence on also not letting go of the framework completely. And then always, you know, sort of a lot of commas and a lot of back, asterisk a lot of so yeah, so I think that's the bind.

Femke 1:00:41 shall we...? Because we've been speaking for more than an hour.

Eva 1:00:59 Thank you.

Jen 1:00:59 Thank you for inviting me and thank you to everybody and I'm very excited.