"Both my works came from thinking about language as landscape and landscape as language..."

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (2024). She teaches creative writing at Kenyon College.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS: “Translator”

Artist Reflection

Both my works came from thinking about language as landscape and landscape as language. “Translator” spells out a Korean phrase that literally means does not even make words, but more commonly signifies does not make sense, something like saying no way. I wrote the text several years ago thinking about the oddities of two languages unnoticeable to anyone living only in one of them; it was then a kind of coda or gloss to another work, and I was thinking about my role translating for my family. In practicing literary translation in recent years, I began to understand the text as its own work, just as translating is its own art. I was curious about what senses are created and refused in thinking of characters, letters, and words as shapes themselves, and used my own Korean handwriting to fill with English letters. This rendering emerged from the technical skills Diana Khoi Nguyen generously shared with me, which allowed for considering the aesthetic possibilities of text as image. “Before the DMZ” I also wrote in its first form a long period ago, when I could not wholly resolve its narrative with its form, which initially was a stanza break between two left-justified stanzas. The poem discusses a border that, in its more recent demarcation, continues to separate my family members and horizon my understanding of space, but also addresses my own estrangement from the deterministic diction of nations. Once the poem became itself the country, I could make the DMZ a much closer and more overlapping gap in language, a visual story by lack of story.