Language Is Political in Don Mee Choi's Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode

Mike Corrao has some notes on Don Mee Choi's new pamphlet from Ugly Duckling Presse, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, for the Action Books blog. In fragments, Corrado offers ideas like "[l]anguage is not an apolitical and ahistorical system. Its mutations are engendered by existing or emerging power structures." More:

Choi uses the example of oksusuppang. Oksusuppang, a food which was fed to South Korean school children after the Korean War, can be translated as cornbread in English. But these words do not equate to one another. They do not share the same distinct histories and contexts. These children did not eat cornbread, they ate oksusuppang. Even if the words, linguistically speaking, can be directly connected.

^

How does the translator navigate this system then? In which utterance and consumption infect one another, and in which seemingly correspondent words cannot embody one another?

Don Mee Choi says, “I traverse such order-words and map them, and superimpose another kind of map—the map of my dislocation…”

The full piece can be read here.