“There is a place in language where we can meet”: An Interview with EJ Koh

By Chezy David

EJ Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award and Longlist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry. Her co-translation of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today.

Koh is the recipient of the Virginia Faulkner Award and fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Jack Straw Writers Program, Kundiman, MacDowell, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle for English Language and Literature on Korean and Korean American literature, history, and film.

Chezy David: I remember one of the ways I knew I wanted to read The Magical Language of Others—besides the exciting reviews, of course—was its beautiful cover design. Can you tell us a bit about the hardcover design? Where did the inspiration for the flower and girl come from? 

EJ Koh: Ensee, or Mi Kyung Choi is the Korean illustrator and artist behind the cover. One thing was I wanted to see somebody like me––a Korean woman––on the cover. The title was translated, and I added my Korean name. The font was chosen because it recalled a sense of the Korean language. 

CD: In an interview with The Rumpus, you discuss your editing peculiarities of ensuring no word is left alone on a line, how each word at the end of an enjambed sentence must “carry the burden of transporting the reader to the next line.” You also transformed an initial draft of translations into a memoir, as opposed to another collection of poems. Can you speak to your perhaps atypical creative decision-making?" 

EJK: When I hear myself in interviews, I wince just a bit. I feel like it sounds pretentious to get so absorbed in my own process. But I can get carried away with how things are placed in space, the architecture on a page. It does come from poetry but also my years in dance. I’d never intended to write a memoir. I started with a book of translations of my mother’s letters with a two-page introduction. After years of revision, it became a two-hundred-page introduction with her letters. 

CD: In a podcast with the University of San Francisco, you talk about how at the beginning of 2016, you had quit writing. “Writing is not the thing,” you said. “It is the thing to gets me to the real thing.” A lot of (budding) writers often feel writing is their identity, rather than a venue through which we can reach the truth and human connection. Did you ever feel this way? How did you come to the realization that writing is the thing to get you to the “real thing?” 

EJK: When I quit writing, I decided to write a thousand love letters to strangers by hand. I got requests from around the world and even a block away from me. Today, I’m sending my 300thlove letter. I learned I could live without writing, but I couldn’t live without human connection. It helped me get back after six months and opened the world for me. Somebody once told me writing is my ladder. The ladder could be anything, but it must take me somewhere––to reciprocity, reparation, connection, suffering, and joy.

CD: Forgiveness—magnanimity—is a core theme to your memoir. In an interview with the University of Washington last December, you discussed how finishing this memoir didn’t necessarily allow you to forgive your parents completely but rather allow you to approach that forgiveness. How has your relationship with forgiveness (or as you put it: “letting go”) changed since publishing your memoir? 

EJK: Cristina Rivera Garza says in Grieving: “Those who imagine can always imagine that this, whatever this is, can be different. This is the critical power of imagination.” In my first writing class, I learned the word magnanimity. It was about holding, at once, my grief and anger with forgiveness and love. To me, it’s become so many things since, like a perspective, an exercise, a lens. I’ve now been looking deeper into the role of imagination, like Garza says, and its ability to both create a war and make a life after it. Imagination as critical in holding as much as letting go. 

CD: What’s your advice on getting a memoir or collection of poems published? For instance, before your translation of your mother’s forty-nine letters turned into a memoir, all your submissions of these translations were rejected. What was it like for you bouncing back from those rejections and finally drafting and submitting your memoir manuscript to literary agents and publishers? 

EJK: It’s almost like a practice. In the beginning, rejection was quiet and acceptance was loud. After a while, rejection was loud and acceptance was loud. Now, rejection is quiet and acceptance is quiet. My heart feels calmer, not yet completely calm but getting there. But when one of my students or a colleague gets a rejection, it breaks my heart. Because I know how hard it is and what the mind can make it mean. My hope is that we lift each other up harder during those moments. Take a break, go for a walk, send a love letter. 

CD: Washington Square Review is a literary magazine managed by MFA students. What is your advice to MFA students (or people interested in pursuing an MFA), having been an MFA candidate yourself? 

EJK: Something I wished I’d known while in my program––how to read. At the time, I wasn’t a researcher. I was narrow in my book selection and approach to reading. Looking for multiple ways of reading, looking for lenses through which to read feels important. Because culture is not some baggage we carry around with us but changes constantly. And not to be afraid of making my own syllabi, as if I were to teach myself a subject I’ve never known. Then how would I go about selecting and reading fifty books on the subject? How would I know that I’ve understood what I’ve read––that I’ve grokked it? 

CD: Finally, what’s some advice you can give to other literary translators? You discuss “seamless translation,” which, for instance, if translating Korean to English, “seamless translation” would result in an English translation that sounds as if the original text was written in English—and not Korean—from the beginning. Then, you realized every word has a story and a history, as your University of California, Irvine professor stated. Can you talk more about this or other advice you have to other literary translators? 

EJK: What I learned is that languages have histories. Korean has a history. English has a history. Their histories are intertwined through militarism and war. There are also historically dominant and non-dominant languages. We have loan words, and we have names given to us, names given to war ships on our shores. It was something I recognized in my translation as erasing Korean rather than keeping its presence. I shifted then into translating so that if you read the English, sounds and rhythm and pacing remained Korean. In a sense, you never forget there is a place in language where we can meet.