Despite the craze for Korean literature in India, you’d be hard-pressed to find an Indian fan who knows of Don Mee Choi. She writes poetry, not fiction. She translates as much as she writes. And her poetry offers no easy resolution; it is fragmentary, interdisciplinary and reckless with literary convention.
The 63-year-old—who has won a pantheon of literary honours, including a Whiting Award, a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius grant”—was in Mumbai in April for the Almost Island Dialogues, an annual series of literary conversations among prominent writers from around the world. She spoke with Lounge about her work, the popularity of Korean literature, and how her own preoccupations might find consonances in a place like India.
Although Choi’s poetry is tethered to Korea’s past and present, she would be wary of her work being lumped under the banner of “Korean Literature”—not because she left South Korea as a child owing to the military dictatorship (first for Hong Kong, then the US, and now Germany where she resides), but because she refuses the politics of power embedded in such formulations.
When I ask about the “K-Wave” in literature, she laments that an earlier generation of Korean writers who wrote under dictatorship have failed to be recognised in English translation. “They risked their lives writing!” she says. While she acknowledges that this Korean literary boom (fuelled in large part by the South Korean government’s promotional efforts) has enabled writers with diverse thematic affinities to find a wider readership, she wishes that prominent older writers, such as Park Wan-suh, were read as much today.
Still, Choi’s desire for such remedy has little to do with a sense of nationalism. In her staggering essay, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, she writes, “I am not content to uphold the notion of national literature—the notion that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders…as if such borders are entirely ahistorical and apolitical.”
Borders wrought by colonial violence form the scaffolding of Choi’s work. Poetry is for her a way to write history, to “defy erasure” and speak back to empire from its ruins. “The Korean War is labelled as the forgotten war in the US,” she says. “Forgotten by whom?” Her landmark trilogy of poetry books—Hardly War (2016), DMZ Colony (2020), and Mirror Nation (2024)—offers a counter-narrative to dominant historical accounts of modern Korea.
The poems cut across the region’s history—its occupation by Japan between 1910-45, its partition at the end of World War II, the US occupation, the Korean War which resulted in a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the North and the South in 1953, and the string of US-backed dictatorships that followed. Choi reminds us that the effects of this imperial script are incalculable. She writes in DMZ Colony, “I’ll leave it up to your imagination…whether a divided country is a country or not.”
To speak against such divisions, Choi often channels the voices of other people through her own. In one section, she renders (along with her own marginalia) the testimony of Mr. Anh, a former North Korean prisoner of war, whom she interviewed in his village near the DMZ. Recasting his memories of imprisonment, she writes: “We were side by side squeezed into one another/ The person behind you had to lean against the wall, then you leaned against him/ and the person in front could only sit on your lap/ That is how we slept/ like spoons/ like bean sprouts/ Then terror came.”
This tension between testimony and verse, intimacy and brutality, also reflects the texture of Choi’s project as a whole. To expose the continuum of displacement and grief in the long afterlife of war, she pieces together lyric, archival photographs, maps, drawings, translations, typographic arrangements, and citations of literary theory.
Her father was a documentary photographer who covered events such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which was violently quashed by the South Korean military with US support. Choi reproduces several of her father’s images in her poetry, connecting them with her own diasporic story. These photographs then become a way for her to speak to her family’s past and to the pasts of countless people who continue to be subjects of a colonial project even amidst their freedom. “I remain a daughter of a neocolony,” she writes.
But Choi’s use of images is also part of her search for a language that can appropriately capture the experience of brokenness—of being at once severed from, and haunted by, one’s history. She writes, “I went on searching for more wings, my language of return.” Through words and images, she invokes the departing and returning foreigner as the historical witness. And the foreigner’s language—strange and polyphonic—emerges as a method to reconstruct, indeed translate, a history through fragments.
Choi is a prolific literary translator, most prominently of the contemporary feminist poet Kim Hyesoon who has written in her collection Autobiography of Death, “It may be that women’s or death’s song is sung only in vowels, without the consonants.” In one of her own poems, Choi draws on Hyesoon’s idea and separates out the Korean vowels and consonants that make up the phrase: “Your excellency, is it martial law?” Translation in Choi’s work then operates as a radical mode of writing, of speaking against power and the antagonisms it has propagated. “I wanted to decode and dismantle what this ideology of division has done to Koreans and to me as well,” she says, explaining her philosophy of translation. “You can use translation…to defy ideological borders, as well as physical borders.”
Perhaps most striking about Choi’s work is that although it is so particular to her own life story—the places she has been, the conversations she has had—it also says something fundamental about empire. That empire endures, that we live with it daily. Beyond their own context, her poems might even be propositions for other historical reckonings and a politics of solidarity across these.
Reflecting on how South Asia, like Korea, is a region shaped by partition, Choi says, “We can always find those common marks that are left by colonial history… and what those marks do to our psyches and even our language; they dictate how we think about the ‘other’.” As much as they hold the powerful accountable for their crimes, Choi’s poems also charge each of us to interrogate our particular pasts. Whether or not we have a nation, or seek a home, or have a home in a nation that wrecked another’s. Because the stakes of forgetting are too great. Because “Home is a system of longing,” as Choi writes, “and suicide is a system of exile. Neither is bloodless.”
Poorna Swami is a writer and translator based in New Delhi.