2021 崔东美 诗人和翻译家

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Don Mee Choi
Poet and Translator | Class of 2021
Bearing witness to the effects of military violence and U.S. imperialism on the civilians of the Korean Peninsula.


Portrait of Don Mee Choi
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Title
Poet and Translator
Affiliation
Renton Technical College
Location
Seattle, Washington
Age
59 at time of award
Area of Focus
Poetry, Translation
Website
donmeechoi.com
Social
Twitter
Published September 28, 2021
ABOUT DON MEE'S WORK
Don Mee Choi is a poet and translator grappling with the effects of military violence and U.S. imperial legacies on the Korean Peninsula. Born in Seoul during the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, Choi immigrated first to Hong Kong and then to the United States. In her three volumes of poetry and numerous essays, she explores themes of dislocation, fractured identities, trauma, and memory, while amplifying civilian voices that have been obscured by the history and looming threat of war in her homeland.

Formally, Choi employs a mixed-media approach in her two most recent collections. She intersperses sections of text with typographical experiments, handwritten documents, maps, drawings, archival materials, and photographs taken by her father, who covered war zones and uprisings in Korea and Vietnam as a photojournalist. Throughout her writing, she foregrounds the challenge of using English, the language of a dominant global power, to convey the experiences of those subjected to that power. She often intermixes English and Korean expressions as an interlingual mode of making meaning. Certain potent words and images—such as angels, migrating birds, orphans, and twins—recur in lines that call to mind divided selves that hover between languages in a state of perpetual homesickness. In Hardly War (2016), a hybrid of poetry, memoir, and an opera libretto, she plays and puns with the adverbs “hardly,” “partly,” and “narrowly” to dramatize the difficulty of capturing such horrors as the incendiary power of napalm. Choi chronicles her return to Korea in DMZ Colony (2020). Ruminations on her life beyond Korea and the scattering of family members across the globe are linked to international geopolitics and brutality against civilians during and after the Korean War. Survivors’ voices come into the book in a variety of ways, including through transcripts of interviews with a former political prisoner living near the demilitarized zone. Another section tells the stories of eight orphaned girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre of 1951, in which 705 unarmed South Korean civilians were killed.

A prolific translator, Choi has also championed and brought the work of Korean poets into English. She has translated, most extensively, the vivid, visceral language of Kim Hyesoon, an influential feminist poet whose work has subverted expectations of traditional lyric poetry in Korea. Choi’s intertwined practices as poet and translator bear witness to otherwise unspeakable histories and expand the range of expressive possibilities for writers from diasporic and multilingual backgrounds.

BIOGRAPHY
Don Mee Choi received a BFA (1984) and MFA (1986) from the California Institute of the Arts. She currently serves as an instructor in the College and Career Pathways program at Renton Technical College. Choi’s additional poetry collections include The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), and she has translated a number of books from Korean to English. These translated works include Autobiography of Death (2018), I’m OK, I’m Pig! (2014), Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), and All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011), all by Kim Hyesoon, as well as the anthology Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (2006) and the co‑translated collection of Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020). Her solo art show DMZ Colony: Exhibition of a Book was held at the daadgalerie in Berlin in 2020.

IN DON MEE'S WORDS
Photo of middle aged Asian woman wearing black shirt sitting at desk. Pull quote text below photo: “The question I often I ask myself is, does my art perpetuate historical oblivion? I hope that my work generates literary resistance against geopolitical borders, including the borders of linguistic and literary conventions.


In Hardly War, I was seeking a different language—a language of war and wounds. And in DMZ Colony, I needed a language that could orbit around overlapping memory—a language of return, which demanded that I expand the parameters of my poetry even more by interweaving poetry, prose, photographs, and drawings. In his last essay, “What is the Creative Act?” Deleuze notes “there is a fundamental affinity with the work of art and the act of resistance. . . all works of art are not acts of resistance, but in another way they are.” The question I often I ask myself is, does my art perpetuate historical oblivion? I hope that my work generates literary resistance against geopolitical borders, including the borders of linguistic and literary conventions.



崔东美
诗人和翻译家｜2021级
见证了军事暴力和美帝国主义对朝鲜半岛平民的影响。


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标题
诗人和翻译家
工作单位
伦顿技术学院
工作地点
西雅图，华盛顿
年龄
获奖时59岁
重点领域
诗歌, 翻译
网站
donmeechoi.com
社会
推特
发表于2021年9月28日
关于唐美彩的作品
Don Mee Choi是一位诗人和翻译家，他正在努力解决军事暴力和美帝国主义遗产对朝鲜半岛的影响。在朴正熙的军事独裁统治时期，崔东美出生于首尔，先是移民到香港，然后到美国。在她的三卷诗集和大量散文中，她探讨了错位、断裂的身份、创伤和记忆等主题，同时放大了被她祖国的历史和迫在眉睫的战争威胁所掩盖的平民的声音。

在形式上，Choi在她最近的两个系列中采用了混合媒体方法。她将文字部分与排版实验、手写文件、地图、图画、档案材料和她父亲拍摄的照片穿插在一起，她父亲曾作为摄影记者报道过韩国和越南的战区和起义。在她的写作中，她强调了使用英语这一全球主导力量的语言来传达那些受制于该力量的经验的挑战。她经常把英语和韩语的表达方式混合起来，作为一种跨语言的意义表达方式。某些有力的词汇和图像--如天使、候鸟、孤儿和双胞胎--在行文中出现，让人想起在语言之间徘徊的分裂的自我，处于永久的思乡状态。在《几乎没有战争》（2016）这本诗歌、回忆录和歌剧剧本的混合体中，她用副词 "几乎"、"部分 "和 "狭义 "进行游戏和双关，以戏剧化地描述捕捉凝固汽油弹的燃烧力等恐怖的困难。崔岫闻在《非军事区殖民地》（2020）中记录了她返回韩国的过程。她对自己在韩国以外的生活和家人分散在全球各地的思考，与国际地缘政治和朝鲜战争期间及之后对平民的暴行联系在一起。幸存者的声音以各种方式出现在书中，包括通过采访一位居住在非军事区附近的前政治犯的记录。另一部分讲述了在1951年山清咸阳大屠杀中幸存的8名孤儿的故事，在这次大屠杀中，705名手无寸铁的韩国平民被杀害。

作为一个多产的翻译家，崔永元还倡导并将韩国诗人的作品引入英语。她最广泛地翻译了金惠顺生动、内敛的语言，她是一位有影响力的女权主义诗人，其作品颠覆了人们对韩国传统抒情诗的期望。作为诗人和翻译家，Choi的实践交织在一起，见证了其他无法言说的历史，并扩大了来自散居和多语言背景的作家的表达可能性的范围。

个人简历
Don Mee Choi在加州艺术学院获得了学士（1984年）和硕士学位（1986年）。她目前在伦顿技术学院的学院和职业道路项目中担任讲师。Choi的其他诗集包括《早间新闻令人激动》（2010年），她还将一些书籍从韩文翻译成英文。这些翻译作品包括《死亡自传》（2018年）、《我没事，我是猪！》（2014年）、《Sorrowtooth》。(2014), Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), and All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011)，都是由金惠顺创作的，还有选集《文字的焦虑》。韩国妇女的当代诗歌》（2006年）和共同翻译的《李桑》诗集。作品选》（2020年）。她的个人艺术展DMZ Colony。2020年在柏林的daadgalerie举办了书的展览。

用唐蜜的话说
身穿黑色衬衫的中年亚洲妇女坐在办公桌前的照片。照片下面的引文："我经常问自己的问题是，我的艺术是否使历史遗忘永久化了？我希望我的作品能产生对地缘政治边界的文学抵抗，包括语言和文学惯例的边界。


在《艰难的战争》中，我在寻求一种不同的语言--一种关于战争和伤口的语言。而在《非军事区殖民地》中，我需要一种可以围绕重叠的记忆的语言--一种回归的语言，这要求我通过交织诗歌、散文、照片和图画来进一步扩大我的诗歌的参数。在他的最后一篇文章中，"什么是创作行为？" 德勒兹指出，"艺术作品和抵抗行为之间有一种基本的亲和力。......所有的艺术作品都不是抵抗行为，但在另一个方面，它们是。" 我经常我问自己的问题是，我的艺术是否使历史遗忘永久化？我希望我的作品能产生对地缘政治边界的文学抵抗，包括语言和文学惯例的边界。