On Testimonials, Translations, and the “Permission to Write”: A Conversation with Jihyun Yun
By JinJin Xu
Jihyun Yun is a Korean-American poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. A Fulbright Research Fellow, her debut poetry collection, Some Are Always Hungry, won the 2019 Prairie Schooner Prize and was published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2020.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, NinthLetter, Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is working on a novel.
JinJin Xu: The dedication of your book says, “For my mother & her mother & hers,” and the poems in this book interweave their voices with your own, creating an epistolary landscape of memory and inherited trauma, of violences multiplied throughout time and bodies.
Was it a conscious choice for you to write from the experience of your mother and grandmother? How did this act of empathy affect your relationship to memory, language, and the act of writing?
Jihyun Yun: I didn’t consciously choose to write through the lens of my mother and grandmother’s experience, but in a lot of ways, I’m not surprised my work tethered itself to their voices. It feels like an organic continuation of my upbringing. Like many other children of immigrant families, I spent a lot of time accompanying my mother and grandmother everywhere—from the doctor’s office to the butcher’s—in order to translate for them.
I’m used to letting them speak through me, and this also proved to be true on the page. Writing about them feels as much like an act of filial piety as translating for them in any other circumstance.
My tongue can be a fairly poor sieve at times, though. My Korean is conversationally fluent, but it’s far from perfect. The stakes of mistranslation were impressed upon me for as long as I remember. What if my imprecision in relaying a message to an acquaintance causes a relational rupture? What if I’m inaccurate while translating a pharmacist’s instructions, resulting in real harm?
I worry about similar things with my work. I don’t want my poems to change how their subjects perceive their own histories. To translate their lives with as much exactitude as possible despite my linguistic shortcomings, I treated writing poems about my family like I was conducting interview research. I mapped out timelines and kept extensive notes about their lives that I then wove into the poems.
A lot of the particulars, of course, were cut during revision. But the fact that they lived in earlier drafts make the scaffolding feel more true. Due to language barrier, my mom and grandma will never really read my book but I navigated writing as if they would.
JinJin: I am curious about the form of the recipe, its lineation, inherent reassurance, and how you blend the form's rhythm with threads of narrative. When did your poems begin to take such forms, and why did you find it so generative?
Jihyun: I began to gravitate towards the recipe form after I finished my first one, “War Soup.” The poem was initially in tercets, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to comb out the different threads of that particular poem in a way that didn’t feel confused and cluttered.
I decided to break down and reassemble the poem into a recipe on a whim and found that the way recipes necessitate a certain amount of linear progression, imperatives, and numerical separation helped me organize inherently chaotic topics like loss, grief, and cruelty.
After figuring out “War Soup’s” form, I went back and transitioned some poems with diffuse energy into recipes and found that not only did they work better on their own, they helped scaffold the collection, giving the book the illusion of section breaks even though it has none.
I am also drawn to the inherent warmth of recipes. I know many find long recipe preambles cumbersome in cookbooks and online food blogs, but I love to read them and almost invariably, they mention family. My recipe poems too, are often about my family and the love language we share, which is feeding. I hope that borrowing the form imbues my poems with that same feeling of warmth and dedication to satiate.
JinJin: You were in Korea a few years ago doing research as a Fulbright fellow, how did your experience there influence your writing?
Jihyun: My Fulbright year was so full of magic, truly one of the best experiences of my life. I do have to admit that in terms of my grant purpose, I objectively failed. My initial grant proposal was that I wanted to spend the year interviewing and writing poems about the Haenyeo (female free-divers from Jeju Island).
I did go to Jeju often, and I did interview and spend time with a lot of these women, but it quickly became apparent that I’m not the right person to write the poems I’d initially set out to write. I abandoned my intended project about halfway into the year. Still, the Fulbright year helped me access the heart of my family poems.
My grandparents repatriated to Korea in 2016, so while I was experiencing the country for the first time, my Grandmother was there with me, introducing me to her country. While she was private in the United States, she was a lot more eager to tell me stories in Korea, stories which eventually became poems like “Revisitations” and “Savaging”. Her decision to share so many more of her memories with me felt like the implicit permission that I’d been seeking to write them.
It made the poems I ended up forging feel less speculative and more testimonial. Though I didn’t write the book I thought I would write during my Fulbright, I don’t think Some Are Always Hungry could have been finished without the time, permission, and financial backing it afforded me.
I couldn’t have edited so many of the poems without having the opportunity to travel the country with my grandmother, seeing the country through both of our eyes.
JinJin: Everything you said resonated with me as I am learning how to write again in my hometown, Shanghai, after learning to write poems in another land. I am very curious about what you said about the choice to abandon a project. I recently read the writings of Agnes Martin in which she says the marker of an artist is "to fail and fail, and still go on." What is your work's relationship to failure? How do you keep on going?
Jihyun: I’m in a season of failure right now, actually. This past year, I turned down lots of opportunities, didn’t write much, and most of what I did produce I ended up scrapping for parts. I have a symbiotic relationship with failure, it teaches me, and I take from it.
My past failures have always opened paths for me in the ways that mattered most. If I didn’t abandon my Fulbright, I would have ended up with a manuscript where I took up space I shouldn’t and thus ethically, I would not be able to submit it.
Instead, failing my grant opened up time and energy to fully throw myself into finishing Some Are Always Hungry. If my book was accepted before it was by UNP in 2019 (It was a finalist at more than ten contests and open reading periods, I’ve been submitting it since 2016), there is a good chance it may not have been a book I’m proud of anymore.
Of course, it always stings in the moment, but I just try to remember that failure just means I have to walk in another direction, and who knows what sorts of feasts I might come across. It’s that excitement of unknowing that sustains my love of the craft.