"I Refuse to Translate" by Don Mee Choi

For Don Mee Choi, translation is an act of decolonization. Her second collection, Hardly War, is interpolated with deliberate mistranslations of Korean into English as a way to disrupt U.S. accounts of the Korean War. To defy a faithful translation into English is to resist the grasp of U.S. imperialism, or as Choi puts it: “I refuse to perpetuate the official narratives of the Korean War, which thingifies. I think of refusal as one of the most highly effective modes of resistance. I refuse to be faithful.” —Jein Han

Don Mee Choi. Hardly War. Seattle: Wave Books, 2016.