Conversation with Jennifer Hayashida: Translating as a site of reuse

This public conversation with friend and colleague, translator and poet Jen Hayashida took place at the event “First Times do not exist”, we organised at Göteborg Litteratur Huset in autumn 2023. The title is a reference to Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza’s work on disappropriation reflecting on the communality of writing and reading in the face of violence. The question of communality is also at the very centre of the research project “Ecologies of Dissemination”, which provides the context of this event. We, Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr, are interested in finding protocols and practices of, what we call, “courageous sharing” – ways of distributing, disseminating and sharing materials, while at the same time, taking care of what happens when things move between contexts. A context can be a place, or a community that holds the material, or time – when you take something on that has been done many years ago. All these shifts produce reasons for being attentive to what happens when the sharing is done.

We are coming from a practice of open content, of copyleft, from a politics of sharing that is trying to go against the conventional idea of copyright, that an author is a legal entity, a citizen recognized by the law, who, as an individual, has the right to say (or not), what happens to the materials that they say they have produced. We chose the title for this event, because we 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 will go through others again. How do you do that? How do you make the conditions of reuse explicit?

With this question in mind we are talking with Jennifer Hayashida about her experiences and reflections of translating as a practice of reuse. We were curious about the ways she is in dialogue with the texts, the writers or previous translations and translators. What are the forms and practices of seeking consent, of checking in when working on a translation. Or should we say, when reusing?

This public interview has been conducted by Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting. This transcript also includes questions and contributions by participants Nils Olsson and Ram Krishna Ranjan.

Jen Hayashida (JH): So, my name is Jen. I'm a translator, and I'm a PhD candidate in artistic research at HDK Valand in Gothenburg. I think it's important to say that these questions and the conversation today are in many ways a continuation of the conversation that Eva, Femke and I had online, two months ago. Meaning, the questions that came up then are the same questions that animate this discussion today.

To me, it’s important to say that I grew up between languages, that I’ve always been a translator, whether I was conscious of it or not. I'm born in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I grew up outside Stockholm, and I’ve spent my entire life in the borderlands between Swedish and English. I'm also not racialized as Swedish, so I've navigated language through the different ways “Asians” are racialized in the US and Sweden.

I’ve always moved between contexts: in California, where my father lived, I had one identity, as Asian American, fourth-generation Japanese American in a family originally from Hawai’i. And then in Sweden, I had another racialized identity, which did not at all overlap with the one in the US: I was mixed race in a country that has no word for being mixed race, and to most people I presented as Asian, and then as Asian adoptee, given the fact that Sweden then had high rates of transnational adoption from South Korea. Translating those identities – moving between them and seeing how they talk to each other through me – is how I think about translating language.

A big part of my research has to do with the way that sociopolitical context informs how one engages with language: what forms of experience one brings to bear in the act of translating. For example, I've studied French, but I don't “know” French, not by any stretch of the imagination. Could I translate a sentence? Of course, but my relationship to French is academic. My relationship to American English is different. It's a language that I've been subjugated by, a language that has socialized me. As a result, when I translate to or from American English, my socialization into that language is the foundation for the knowledge that I draw upon. The first fifteen or so years of my practice as a translator, I translated only from Swedish to English. After I started at Valand, I began translating together with Andjeas Ejiksson, then my colleague there, and we now translate together in the opposite direction, from American English to Swedish. Swedish has socialized me in other ways, into a different kind of subject: whereas I in American English feel more confident in terms of the rules and how to break them just right, Swedish leaves me feeling more uncertain, muffled.

To me, what’s so interesting about today’s event is this notion of translation as reuse and this idea of there not being an original. Andjeas and I work primarily with two writers: a Korean American poet, Don Mee Choi, and then also the South Korean poet Don Mee translates from Korean to American English, Kim Hyesoon. We translate Don Mee’s poetry from English to Swedish, but we also translate Don Mee’s English translations of Kim Hyesoon into Swedish, a so-called relay, or indirect, translation. We translate a translation.

I’d say it’s a form of translation that’s not as unusual as people think, but it’s sort of under the radar and seen as somewhat “dirty.” Some scholars and translators actually consider it a contaminated form of translation – for exactly the reasons that you and Femke would probably think it's great – since it redistributes authorship in ways where it becomes negotiated in a really explicit, procedural, way. In our case, this structure came about because Kim Hyesoon was contacted by a Swedish publisher who wanted to publish her work in Swedish. In response, Kim Hyesoon basically said, use the English translation, since she has a very deep artistic and political solidarity with her translator, Don Mee Choi. So this book here, Autobiography of Death, is the American English translation that came out a few years ago from the US publisher New Directions. I can pass it around. Look at the copyright: who owns the copyright?

Femke Snelting (FS): There are two copyrights: Kim Hyesoon has copyright and then Don Mee Choi, the translator, has also copyright.

JH: In Autobiografi av död, the Swedish translation of Don Mee's American English translation, Andjeas and I have the copyright, so it's been transferred in three steps. But what's exciting to me is that, methodologically, we're dealing with Don Mee's translation: we're translating a translation, and there's a displacement of a displacement. There's also, like I said, this displacement of the author, or redistribution of authorship. There's a displacement of the singular. There's a displacement of the original. And all this is possible because it was the will of the author, so then there’s a kind of reconsolidation of authorship, I suppose. However, if we had done this on our own and gone rogue and not asked Kim Hyesoon, there would have been a huge ethical problem. But it was her initial request that we operate that way. And to me, that kind of relay, this dirty translation, suggests a poetics. The displacements that take place linguistically, mostly from Korean to American English – what Don Mee had already done – are artistically and politically significant.

Eva Weinmayr (EW): Could you say a bit more about how you understand the moments of displacement and what they do?

JH: I see multiple displacements. There's the movement from Korean to American English, which necessitates a bunch of linguistic displacements, the big one being a movement from a logographic to an alphabetical system. But then, of course, there’s Don Mee's presence, or interventions, as a translator: we are reading Don Mee's reading of Kim Hyesoon. So we as translators are also displaced in some ways by virtue of reading somebody else's translation.

There’s also a further displacement, which has to do with the movement, not simply into Swedish, but into Sweden. How does a work that is a critique of how the South Korean nation-state operates resonate in another state context, that is, in Sweden, where South Korea has a different significance than it does in North America? So how does this work get read through the filter of the Swedish welfare state, Sweden's history with South Korea, and the Koreas more generally? How does Swedish understanding – or misunderstanding – of East Asia, East Asian politics, East Asian subjectivity, come in? I guess this is where I also return to my own experiences of growing up “Asian American” in the US and “Asian ‘adoptee’” in Sweden – I mean, how my Asianness is legible in North America vs. in Scandinavia.

Translation is also, as Choi writes, a mapping for thinking geopolitically about translation, how various nodes (the US, the Koreas, Sweden) link political and historical circuits that might reveal, or point to, continuous unfoldings, displacements, erasures. Personally, I find that the triangulation inherent to dirty translation is incredibly fruitful, since it makes clear how languages engage with, and pass through, each other.

There’s a desire within world literature to think that you're accessing the original when you're reading a translation – but that, to me, is just a fiction. The translation is a new text, recontextualized – not necessarily in the sense of it being localized, domesticated, to its new context, but read against other histories as they are inscribed in the target language. In the case of working with Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon, the workflow and the material objects concretize and make more explicit what, I think, is always happening.

FS: You spoke about the solidarity politics of the authors and translators in this working relation. Is there any way you can check in or make explicit what the limits of dirtiness are? To make these limits explicit might be important in other environments or work relationships? Just to know what is okay and what not?

JH: I can only point to this particular instance, to the working relationships we have with these two people, with a sort of continuous process of consent. It's funny, though, since I've never thought about it that way. When I'm translating – and again, we’re primarily talking about living authors – a lot of the work involves emailing them and asking questions about word choices. I realize now that this can also be seen as continuously affirming whether something is okay with them.

In our case, we have not had direct contact with Kim Hyesoon about word choices, for example, but not because she was disinterested. She just knew that the person who most engaged with the work translationally was Don Mee. So Don Mee was the gatekeeper in some ways, but she is also a very non-gatekeeping person. She sometimes describes the process of translating Kim Hyesoon as “being in a state of trance”. So, when we asked her questions about word choices, it wasn’t always easy for her to reach back and recall how decisions had been made. We would discuss choices with her, but it was rarely a question of right or wrong. She’d primarily encourage us to see the circuits of her reasoning to try to see how we might engage in, or enact, similar circuits in Swedish.

What prompted this question about checking in on limits, is that, for the first time in my life, I'm now working with a dead writer, Sara Lidman, whose language is wild, whose poetics involve multiple disruptions of how Swedish language operates. 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 there's obviously an artistic value to having a dialogue and being able to work out solutions together. Not having that kind of dialogue with this writer means that I've had to turn to people who are very engaged with and loyal to her project. She wrote specifically about Västerbotten in northern Sweden, and consulting with writers and scholars who are committed to her depictions of Västerbotten also involves a dispersal in some ways. Because I'm reading the work, on my own but also through them, their readings then become part of my reading. Here the negotiations of those limits are very much subject to these other people's ethics and what they would consider the limits of decision-making, which in turn involves their conceptions of what translation even is. Is it a transfer? Is it a decanting? Or is it a more artistically feral process? The limit to be checked is in that sense determined by what you believe translation should – or could – be in the first place.

EW: One of our questions was when reuse is happening, like where text is transferred from one language, from one nation state, from one context to another, what do we have to watch out for? What issues, or elements in the process to pay attention to when you enter into a process of reuse, in this case through translation? You used the word “loyalty”, which seems really interesting in this context.

FS: And I would also at some point like to come back to “being in trans” as a way to somehow be ready for reuse. What it means to be in trans and how do you become in trans?

JH: What to watch out for? I think it's a temporal question, which is also at the heart of what you titled this event, “First times do not exist.” Because this notion that you're the first person entering the story is incredibly relevant now: do you call something a defence, or do you call it an attack? What is the translator’s position in relation to the text? If the translator imagines that they are the first person there, as a kind of settler, then that makes me suspicious. The same is true of the author, obviously. If the author has a stake in their writing, where they want to be able to claim that they are the first person on the scene, then that to me is something which puts me on alert. As a translator, I think it’s imperative to be mindful of the fact that you're never the first person on the scene, to treat the language and the claims of the text with that kind of transhistorical awareness.

EW: How do you select what you translate? You just mentioned, you're in the privileged position not to have to make a living from translation. I am asking because translation is also giving visibility within a context where the text might not have been written in.

JH: Right now, I’m in the fortunate position of being able to select what translations I take on, but I’m very aware of how precarious that position is. For every book that's translated, there are probably 100 books that aren't. And the selection process, whereby books get translated, is determined by a largely North American and western European literary capitalist structure that makes decisions based on largely imperial and colonial desires. There is an apparatus that makes things possible, but that apparatus is also like “the first person on the scene.” That apparatus, to me, is predetermined by deeply violent and racist and classist claims to exceptionalism. Yes, the act of translation makes something possible, but there's a stronger machine that is the publishing industry, and that machine doesn’t always make the most ethical or politically imaginative decisions.

I talked to a friend of mine who works in publishing in North America, about the ways translation is also about reproduction, reproducing the fantasies of others. In Sweden, for example, I think about half of the literature published is translated from other languages. To me, that's deeply interesting, because in the US, it's 4%. There's also the data around who translates in the US: a survey of the American Literary Translators Association found that it’s overwhelmingly white. As a result, I often wonder whose desires make an imprint on the market, but also on the works in translation.

FS: So can we go back to the...

JH: ...trance question?

FS: Yes. As we are trying to figure out practices of reuse, I thought, “being in trance” is maybe a state of being that would be helpful for doing reuse in a reasonable or ethical way.

JH 26:41 My take on what it means – and I want to be very clear that it's entirely speculative – but knowing just a little bit about the relationship between Don Mee and Kim Hyesoon, I’d say it’s that they have a shared history, and that this history opens up to a kind of trance-like state in translation. It’s a shared history that has to do with a relationship to, and suspicion of, the South Korean state apparatus, as well as a deep commitment to feminist experimental South Korean poetry. I think that's the place of trance for Don Mee, but it's definitely not outside capital, not outside empire, not outside language, or outside the regime of English, because a lot of Don Mee’s poetics has to do with disrupting the normative functionality of American English.

I also think it has to do with memory and being in memory, corporeally, and being in memory with Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. It's how Don Mee talks about it, both in terms of what she is able to remember and what she is unable to remember. It does seem to have to do with where they meet up experientially, but also genealogically, and their shared commitments to anti-imperial, feminist, what Don Mee terms anti-neo colonial violence, and I think the trance is situated in that sort of oppositional labour. So I guess that is the proposition of the work, it's in the opposition, in the trance.

FS: I mean, it also resonates with loyalty. You spoke about commitment and loyalty. What is that loyalty for you?

JH: Kindness? Kindness is a big part of it. I feel like I’m talking to my kids. But yes, there's an interview between Don Mee and Kim Hyesoon in the back of Autobiography of Death, where they talk about when they first met and were translating for a feminist organization in South Korea. These were women who had experienced various forms of violence as a result of militarism and colonialism, and they were both transcribing and translating testimonials into English. And I think that kind of loyalty, mobilizing your knowledge or experience in an anti-neocolonial way, I think that’s a form of loyalty that I'm deeply committed to, something I’ve witnessed and learned from in their relationship.

I think the other kind of loyalty that's interesting to me – and this comes up in my teaching, but also in my working relationship with Andjeas – is that I think we do the hardest work, the work that demands the greatest loyalty, when we come up against not-knowing. If I had to create a hierarchy, English is my first language, Swedish is my sort-of second language. Andjeas is very much a Swedish speaker: he has no lack of confidence with the Swedish language, but English is not his first language. We meet in our respective linguistic strengths and weaknesses. And I think it’s in the weaknesses where we do the most interesting work. I think that, for us, it's been a productive way of working, to acknowledge weakness as a place to linger, as opposed to a place to get away from.

I also think – and this is really just my own opinion – that it's sometimes easy to be seduced by the target language, by the imagined reader of the translation. But I think that being loyal with the poetics of the text, depending on what it is, that's what's at stake: being able to discern how the text operates and what its commitments are. And then being loyal with that. At the same time, when I teach, I'm also a proponent of disloyalty. So I think it depends on what text you're working with, what reader you have in mind, how you can toggle between various interpretations of loyalty.

EW: What would then disloyalty mean?

JH: It goes back to that other question about a text that makes claims around being the first. I think there are ways in which you as a translator, in your word choices, can signal that the claims being made are not necessarily robust. So the translation would be in active dialogue with the original – I mean, 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 snared into my own language. I think a bad translation is really interesting. What is a bad translation? Everybody in this room, I think, would have a different definition of what that is. And so, when we claim to aspire to a good translation, I think we should be open to the fact that that means different things to all of us. To me, a good translation is a translation where you can sense that it's a translation. You don’t necessarily stumble, but you become aware of the fact that the footing has shifted. For many people, that’s a terrible translation. But to me, the translation could be seen as a contaminated artefact: it was already contaminated when it arrived as the original. Andjeas writes about this in our translators’ note for Autobiografi av död, that the translation can be seen as a ruin, but we argue that the original was a ruin all along. When reading, you’re walking through the ruin of a ruin. I think a good translation tells you that it's a ruin, and that the thing was never whole to begin with.

Not to domesticate the text is, to us, 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 disclosure holds a political and poetic purpose. It's the same thing with Knappt krig, the translation of Don Mee’s Hardly War. There are ways that Don Mee mobilizes American English to signal that there's Korean behind the English. She refers to it as a fraying of the language, which I've since understood also comes from Gayatri Spivak. And that fraying gets to stay. It’s not just that it gets to stay, but that it has a poetic and political purpose. And that's where my own 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 my ninth-grade Swedish in order to try to be loyal with Don Mee’s fraying, which sometimes makes it sound like it's a bad translation. There are elements that are incorrect, wobbly, edges that we haven't smoothed out.

EW: Before we open up the conversation to the floor I wanted to ask one more question. When you flipped through the books checking who has the copyright for which translation. It’s a question about holding rights. How do you feel about holding the copyright for your translation?

JH: I once translated a blockbuster from Swedish to English. And this book was sold to nearly 30 different countries. It was a novel. Obviously it wasn't a book of poetry! I worked with a literary agency, and that work was for money. So when you do that kind of money work as a translator, the agency ends up with the copyright and you give up all rights to audio, film, everything. You give it all to the agency and the agency, in turn, keeps selling it.

I think that what’s interesting about being a translator to English, in that situation, is that I had no claims to the work whatsoever, which obviously has financial implications. There's been a big discussion among North American and Western European translators, in particular, about having the translator’s name on the cover of the book, which to me is a way of skirting the fact that the translator still rarely has any legal or financial claims to the translation after the work of translation is done.

At the same time, I’m used to having that kind of abject role. And I don't mean that in a victimized way, but most of the time I translate poetry, so I’ll hold the copyright, but it's such a devalued form, so I hold the copyright to something that very few people want. It’s a terrible thing to say about poetry, and not at all about my own feeling or position, but it’s how the market operates. I feel a sense of tenderness towards poetry, because I have the copyright to something that in some ways exists on the margins of the market, in a state of chronic, but perhaps also fruitful, precarity.

And so, to me, copyright signals so many different things in terms of what it is that it safeguards. 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 who takes care of poetry? Copyright as a way of taking responsibility versus claiming ownership, I guess that's what I'm saying: tending to something versus capitalizing on it. So, depending on what the copyright is attached to – and this also has to do with who is the author – whose rights are being safeguarded through copyright and who is assuming responsibility?

EW: So interesting that you bring rights and responsibilities together in this context. What would it mean to take responsibility for this “dirty translation”? Is it a sort of custodianship, or control over its use? Do you feel protective about it? And wouldn’t this be possibly counteracting your dirty translation chain?

JH: I mean, protection and control – I've been in enough psychotherapy to pretend that I understand the difference between the two. I think this goes back to the consent question, where we are in continuous dialogue. I would never claim to control this translation, because nearly every decision that Andjeas and I make about its distribution or dissemination, how it will exist in the world, is in dialogue with Don Mee. It's like we are her ambassadors – to use a 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 think – sorry, this is a deeply problematic thing to say – but in some ways, the Swedish copyright and the fact that she has the copyright in English, there's a kind of solidarity in that. But it's such a deeply problematic framework. I understand that it's like a dirty kind of solidarity in a way, but again, I think my way of considering copyright in this particular situation has to do with the abject status of poetry.

If she was Knausgård, and I was his translator, I think there are different ways that the already inscribed hierarchies of mainstream literature would completely undermine what I'm saying right now. Because that huge machine of mainstream literary capital means that, of course, the translator is not in solidarity through copyright with the author.

But this much more horizontal relationship in our project means that the copyright signifies something a little bit otherwise than what it normally would. I'm just interested in this idea from the vantage point of dealing with a genre that is not at the center in the first place. I just think that it does something with the meaning of copyright.

Nils Olsson: I'm trying to imagine someone deciding to not work within a given form of circulation of literature. Because no copyright could perhaps be an alternative to conventional forms of distribution?

JH: I don't know… Don Mee debuted as a Korean American writer, not writing in her first language, linguistically and geographically displaced by war. I'm oversimplifying this, and she is not here to speak for herself, but she debuts in a North American literary market when she's in her late forties. With her second book Hardly War, and then her third book, DMZ Colony, she becomes widely recognized with a number of prestigious awards. She wins a MacArthur Fellowship, which is one of the most prestigious awards you can get in the United States. So, to me, no copyright for someone like that isn’t really an option. I think there's an ethics attached to the fact that she's a person of colour who works with small presses. To say that she would not have a legal claim to her own work in the face of an apparatus that eats everything, would, to me, be ethically problematic.

I think that the demand to interrogate the meaning of copyright needs to be very specific, depending on the person and work at hand. It's easy to make those sort of sweeping claims for a utopian alternative where there is no such thing. And [the issue is] that a claim like that implies that there's no prehistory, a prehistory which transcends the question of copyright, which has to do with colonialism, empire, racial capitalism. And I think that those things predate – and I’m obviously no legal scholar – copyright. And that mechanism [of copyright] is certainly a symptom of something, but its undoing is not necessarily going to solve a fundamental problem. Copyright isn't the first problem on the scene, I guess.

Ram Krishna Ranjan (RKR): You articulated it really well, and I understand and appreciate the dilemma. With regards to copyright, I also think that we should link it to the project of colonialism. Copyright is very much an extension of the colonisation of time and space. Now we are at a point where people in marginal spaces are responding and reclaiming time and space. So, the turn towards dismantling time and space and imagining a utopian other time for the copyright to be challenged is a bit unresolved. It produces a legitimate concern – finally, when people on the margins can claim or partake in the fruits of copyright, we are thinking of dismantling it altogether. And this is why your point about the meaning of copyright to be specific is very important - what is the material and who is it attached to?

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

RKR: I'm also thinking of post-colonial states and societies. Often, the legal framework around ideas of property and copyright is still informed by colonial practices. And the struggle for people in marginal spaces fighting copyright is that they fight the frameworks laid down by the postcolonial state. Still, simultaneously, they have to rely on the state to protect them from injustices. So, it's a bind that they are constantly navigating and struggling with. Therefore, it's like: I'm going to oppose copyright, but only to an extent, because I also know that if I dismantle the framework, I will be paying the price more than anybody else.

Gothenburg, October 2023