Honoring the Opaque: Strategies for (Not) Translating Queerness

I’m writing this because of a translator’s note that’s got me worked up, a paratext that appears in the Korean edition of Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby. Despite knowing all too well, as a translator myself, how difficult this book must have been to work on, I’ve been reading it with furrowed brows, irked by the way the translator rendered certain English phrases in Korean and defined queer lingo for readers not in the know. To be honest, it’s rare that I can immerse myself in work translated between English and Korean. Because I work in this language pair myself, I always end up wondering how the source text reads, how I would have handled it. And when that text is a queer one? My antennae get even more twitchy. As Peters said in an interview with The Rumpus, Detransition, Baby is a book she wrote for a trans audience, first and foremost.^# This is why it skips over regurgitations of Trans 101 and becomes “one hundred percent story.” Peters doesn’t eliminate or explain lingo that might not be familiar to cis, straight readers—U-Haul lesbian, for one, or even detransition—trusting that readers will keep up. But how might a translator—tasked with making the text accessible for Korean readers—convey Peters’s approach?

I found an answer on the first page of the novel, which included a lengthy translator’s note defining the term cisgender. In the Korean edition of Detransition, Baby, translator’s notes are not listed at the bottom of the page or the final pages of the book, but inserted right next to the relevant word in a smaller font. This makes it basically impossible to avoid reading the notes, which operate as physical interruptions to the story. As a trans Korean who had been thrilled to see the book finally available in my first language, I couldn’t help thinking that these interjections were indicators of how much queerness is seen as outside of “common sense” in Korean society.

I’m not frustrated because of some notes on what I, a bilingual trans Korean, consider “basic” terms. As a translator, I understand aspiring to share a book with a wider audience, to make a text accessible to those who may not be familiar with Anglophone queer vocabulary. I’ve also added a fair number of similarly explanatory notes to a book about transmasculinity that I’ve translated from English into Korean. And in the opposite direction, when I work to introduce Korean queer texts to Anglophone readers, I write pitch letters that outline the significance of the text and its author, explaining how the work contributes to the landscape of “world literature” in English. I’ve come to accept this “translation-adjacent”^# work of aiding the reader and advocating for the text—especially because I’m so often amplifying voices from marginalized communities. The translator’s note that shook me was not unpacking the meaning of an emic term; it was attached to a description of the protagonist’s body, or rather to the name she had given a certain body part.

As [Reese] shaved her legs in her cramped tub before the date, she reached down and idly rubbed her shaving cream-covered clit Reese appears to have called her genital organ a clitoris instead of a penis because Reese self-perceives as a woman, and said it again.^#

In this scene, Reese takes a bath as she thinks of a man she’s become sexually entangled with. The reader—assuming they have been following the story—already knows that Reese is a trans woman who hasn’t had bottom surgery. Here, Reese is intentionally subverting the gender binary by using the word clit. To some readers this might be cause for confusion, but so what? Reese is talking about her own body. However, the translator chose to undermine the opacity the author intended at this point, because a signifier did not align with their perspective. The translator corrects Reese’s—and the author’s—language by essentially saying, She might think so, but this is not actually true. I wanted to say to the translator, Excuse me—are trannies not allowed to pull a little linguistic stunt? I experienced the note as a transgression of trans authorship, at the levels of both literary artistry and our embodied self-understanding.

There are other choices in the Korean edition that a translator with a better understanding of transness would not have made,^# but this note in particular points to a concern I always have when translating queer texts: the question of how to honor intended opacity. It’s easy to think of translation as the process of making the opaque transparent. After all, a translation makes a text written in one language readable to some who are not familiar with said language. But something I take just as seriously is the translator’s responsibility to preserve opacity. In an essay describing their trajectory as a translator of Anglophone queer writers such as Eli Clare and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarisinha, Korean queer scholar Jun Hye-eun writes, “I only ended up here as I searched for . . . a language that would not conclude that incomprehensibility must lead to discrimination and exclusion, but an open end that acknowledges different realities; a language that could allow the opaque to remain as such even while describing it.”^# We translators often remark that every translation betrays the original, that a replica of the source text in another language could never exist. But sometimes, I stray so far as to choose not to translate Korean expressions into English. Refusing to “transcend” differences by refusing to create a text accessible to all readers is fundamental to my pursuit of beauty, joy, and justice as a translator. Not explaining, whether to clarify or to prove oneself, is the work of allowing the art—and by extension, the reader—to revel in the “freedom in ambiguity,” as articulated by Palestinian feminist poet Fadwa Tuqan.^# A translator must listen not only to the source’s utterances, but also its silences.

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This spring, I translated into English a Korean play entitled “뺨을 맞지 않고 사는 게 삶의 전부가 될 순 없더라”You Can’t Make a Life Out of Not Getting Slapped in the Face . ^# Make a Life is a one-woman show starring Saekja, a first-generation trans performer in her late sixties. In the play, Saekja recounts her trajectory from the 1960s to the present—how in her teens she made her “debut as a homo” cruising “yankees” in Seoul’s Pagoda Theater; spent years working in Japanese bars; and made friends and foes in trans bars across Seoul and Busan, performing for a widely varied clientele. Reflecting her “roller-coaster” path, the play, cowritten by Saekja and playwright Jahye Khoo, alternates between Korean, Japanese, and English. This means the play isn’t entirely or immediately comprehensible even to audiences who speak Korean. But Saekja’s story is also at times incomprehensible because of the idiosyncrasies of her speech. Saekja’s voice reflects the times and places she has lived in, and includes neologisms unique to Saekja. For example, she refers to lesbians as “라즈베리rajeuberi,” the Korean transliteration of raspberry in the play. Korean audiences might be able to recognize the word as sonically similar to the Korean transliteration of lesbian, but I wondered how I should translate this wordplay into English. When I asked Myeong Hyejin, the play’s Korean Sign Language specialist, how they had chosen to interpret it, they said they used the sign for lesbian created by Korean Deaf LGBT+. The standard KSL sign for lesbian has homophobic nuances, so KD+ invented their own signs for queer identity terms and other relevant vocabulary. But because these signs are nonstandard, using them in interpretation allows one to sustain a certain level of opacity.^# As for the English translation, rendering rajeuberi as lesbian would erase Saekja’s linguistic flair; rendering it as raspberry would confuse English readers in unintended ways. In the end, I compromised by translating Saekja’s word as “lezberry.”

When I translate queer Korean texts into English, I often have to devise translations of queer terms specific to Korean culture. The noun 끼kki is one example that stands out in Make a Life. Saekja frequently uses this word to describe herself and her friends, in phrases such as 끼 떤다 kki tteonda, 끼가 난다 kkiga nanda, and 끼가 많다 kkiga manta. In the case of kki tteonda, which is what Saekja would do when she met similarly femme-presenting friends at Pagoda Theater, I was at least able to translate the phrase to the English verb kiki. But the real challenge was in translating kki in noun form. According to the Korean dictionary managed by the National Institute of Korean Language, kki is a colloquial term referring to a talent in performance and entertainment. But for queer Koreans, the term takes on additional layers of meaning. Kki, as I understand it in the Korean queer context, particularly among gay men, is an energy and attitude steeped in femininity, a talent and charisma as vulgar as it is sacred. In Make a Life, Saekja gives a flutter of her lashes while recalling the moment she met her first love: “나는 끼가 나고, 걔는 너무 잘생기고.” In other words, “I was oozing kki, and he was so handsome.” Even if one does not understand the word in the queer sense, the audience is able to get a whiff of Saekja’s kki just from watching her deliver this line. And as someone who has had the privilege of basking in Saekja’s abundant, dazzling kki, I did not want to flatten this embodied, multivalent way of being into a single English word. After all, opacity arises from an irreducible difference, as the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant noted.^#

One strategy a Korean-to-English translator may adopt in such instances is transliteration: translating 끼 as kki and letting it sit as is. “I had plenty of kki, and he was so handsome.” Transliteration is more common in English-language literary translations these days, as postcolonial critiques of translation standards continue to expand the forms of the “foreign” acceptable in Anglophone publishing and the Empire exercises different strategies of governance. But in the case of Make a Life, I wondered if English readers would be able to follow Saekja’s story if I left 끼 as kki. I decided this scene called for a little more hospitality.

How did queer people describe themselves when the terms queer or transgender did not exist? I couldn’t adopt queer lingo used by Anglophone millennials or Gen Z to recreate Saekja’s voice, so I was looking through earlier material when Torrey Peters’s latest book, Stag Dance, caught my attention. The protagonist is a hulking, unattractive lumberjack working in an outlaw logging camp in the nineteenth century. S/He is someone you might call a trans woman by today’s standards; a lumberjack respected for his/her enormous physical prowess, yet one who constantly feels that the way others perceive him/her is at odds with his/her own self-conception. At one point, this character describes a much more feminine-presenting member of the camp in the following way: “[H]e was, as I say, a pretty thing, prettier than even any other camp boy I’d seen . . . and saucy in the way he’d pout when he brought you this or that.”^#

The word sauce has recently come to be a colloquial shorthand for a sort of gender-neutral charisma (“got the sauce”), whereas in adjective form as above, it describes a demeanor that is spicy, sweet, and sour all at once. Seeing it in Peters’s novel reminded me that sauce has had traction across wide swaths of time and space, so I thought it could offer a good glimpse into what kki might mean. So I revised my translation to keep its center on kki but extend a hand toward those readers who might not understand the word right away. “I had plenty of kki, that sauciness, and he was so handsome.”

Though words like kki have Korean origins, the queer lingo in Korea is studded with loanwords from English. A significant example in Make a Life is 젠더. During a monologue about love and marriage, Saekja says,

Should I change my name to a woman’s, change my resident ID number so I’m female on paper? Get hitched to a man? That’s not the world I want to be part of. My ID number, I’m not gonna change it. It’s comfortable for me, living as a 젠더. I like it. I won’t change it. I have a name—젠더. It’s a fabulous name.

Saekja’s fabulous name, 젠더, is the Korean transliteration of the English word gender. In Korea, this is the abbreviation for transgender that is commonly used among trans women of Saekja’s generation, whereas younger trans Koreans call themselves 트랜스transeu or 트젠teujen. But if I were to translate this word as gender, the intended meaning would not be conveyed to the English reader. Translating 젠더 as trans or transgender, on the other hand, would erase the term’s spacio-temporal specificity. This is why I decided to translate it as jenduh. In transliterating into English what was a transliteration of an English word to begin with, I hoped readers would do the guesswork to figure out its meaning from the context.

As I worked to recreate Saekja’s voice in English, I tried to imagine the different venues in which the translation might reach Anglophone audiences. Since Make a Life was a play, I couldn’t consider the English translation a completed piece on its own. Make a Life exists on the stage, where Saekja is physically present. There, my English translation would be an assistive tool, allowing Anglophone audiences to experience more of Saekja’s performance. After I finished translating, I thought of how I might share the play with English audiences. If Make a Life had been a story or a poem, I would have submitted the translation to literary journals. But I knew Saekja’s story had to be transmitted through Saekja’s body. Translation is often thought of as a step undertaken to share a work more widely, to expand its readership. But I hardly think a translation should be designed to give access to anyone, anywhere, who speaks the target language. With this idea of the translation’s role in mind, I talked to the play’s Korean production team and decided to submit the work to a trans theater festival abroad. If the piece got selected, the English translation would be used for subtitles.

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Some readers might point out that awareness and understanding of queerness in Korea and the so-called West are vastly different. Some would say Torrey Peters was able to skip over Trans 101 because she is a white woman living in the U.S. in the aftermath of its “transgender tipping point” of the mid-2010’s. I don’t disagree. But I would still argue that the Korean translation of Detransition, Baby does not prioritize trans readers the way its source text does. As I noted earlier, my qualm is not about adding explanatory paratext to queer terms. I too have included such notes in a book I recently translated—The Terrible We, by trans poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich. But in doing so, my goal was to share Korean reference material that I found informative. This isn’t just because I found it daunting to write my own definitions for loanwords like gender dysphoria or transsexual, though god knows I’ve tried. It’s that other writers have already defined these terms in the Korean context, and I want to share their efforts.^# When translating the language of a marginalized community, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of reinventing the wheel, as if you are the first ever to walk that ground. But if you take the time, you realize that countless others have left their mark before you, and that they are still here raising their voices.

As I worked on translating The Terrible We, I assumed that the primary audience for this book would be other trans, queer, and feminist readers in Korea. In this group, there are of course individuals unfamiliar with loanwords from English and U.S.-centric sociocultural references. So I tried to lower the barriers to access, hoping that this book will be able to reach them. I aimed for transparency, in other words. But at times, I went even further, self-indulgently adding information that might be of interest to these readers, tidbits that might come off as extraneous. For example, I added a footnote to a brief mention of Susan Stryker’s 1993 performance piece “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” to detail the outfit Stryker was wearing at the time. To be frank, footnotes, whether from the author, an editor, or a translator, are one of my favorite things to read.

While this extraneous footnote illustrates how a translator can make a text more transparent than its author intended, a translator’s interventions can also result in a translation that is more opaque than its source. The Korean edition of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, translated by e. yaewon, is an example in which the translator both honors and deepens the opacity of the source text. In this definitive autotheorist text on the queerness of motherhood, Nelson depicts a period in her life when her pregnancy overlapped with the medical transition of her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. Queer lingo abounds in this text—not just butch and femme, but boi, andro-fag, and frottage—yet there are no footnotes for these terms, which have been transliterated into Korean. e. yaewon’s rare translator’s notes instead offer concise introductions to the Anglophone public figures less known in Korea. These choices reflect that the Korean translator/publisher had different target readers in mind for the Korean edition of The Argonauts compared to those anticipated for Detransition, Baby.

The queerness of the Korean translation of The Argonauts is made more pronounced by the translator’s choices for terms related to pregnancy and kinship. Though Nelson uses terms that are quite mundane in the context of contemporary North American English, the translator chose to translate many of them into non-colloquial Korean, as if to apply the author’s argument to their use of the Korean language. For example, the word parents is translated as 양친yangchin, which is a gender-neutral term, as opposed to the commonly used 부모bumo. 양친 is based on the Chinese characters 兩親, which literally translates to both parents, whereas 부모 derives from the characters 父母, meaning “father and mother.” And when Nelson asks the reader,

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body?

the Korean reader encounters 배태baetae for pregnancy, which is usually translated as 임신imshin. The Korean dictionary defines the word 배태胚胎 as the following: “1. The state of being pregnant with child. 2. To carry within oneself the reason for a certain phenomenon to occur or an object to appear.”^# The first definition is the same as the one for 임신妊娠, the more commonly used word. But on encountering pregnancy in the unfamiliar form of 배태, the Korean reader meets the physical transformation obfuscated by the mundanity of the word 임신. Months of flesh splitting, bone bending, and guts being rearranged. Moments when the baby “sticks out a limb and makes a tent of [your] belly.” The Chinese characters that comprise 배태—胚 and 胎—both include the semantic element ⺼, meaning “flesh” or “body.” The Chinese characters for 임신, on the other hand, include the semantic element for “woman” (女), gendering the pregnant body. When a reader encounters an apparently familiar phenomenon through an unfamiliar word, they are given the opportunity to revise their understanding. It is up to the reader, of course, whether the seed of this new formulation will be allowed to germinate.

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There are countless debates over whether translations should be transparent or opaque. Voices that tend to the margins say translations that read as smoothly as flowing water privilege the powerful and the status quo, that there are no equivalencies between languages. These voices give me courage to make my translations more bumpy and coarse. At the same time, I am exhilarated when I land on a translation that seems to match the source text exactly. I am constantly prowling and praying for the equivalencies that live in my fantasies. Poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu’s “errant translator” wanders in the darkness and writes translations that will be difficult to decipher even when one drags them into the light,^# but I admit I think an “unreadable translation” also requires mastery and fluency; the translator needs to be able to feel what sorts of dissonances are beautiful and poetic. All of us who practice translation as both techne and poeisis are creating texts that are opaque in some ways and transparent in others. Isn’t the more important question who we strive to reach with these works, and why? Despite my criticism of the Korean translation of Detransition, Baby, I believe that the translator (and the other publishing professionals involved) worked to fulfill their responsibilities to the reader in accordance with their interpretation of the original. Throughout history, queer people have always spotted ourselves and our kin in texts that disappoint and exclude us.

A more genteel introduction to this essay would have brought up a writing strategy that Torrey Peters describes adopting for Stag Dance. When Peters was writing the earlier Detransition, Baby, she was often asked, by way of feedback, “Why would a trans woman want to become a mother?” Peters wanted to respond, “Do you know why cis women want to be mothers?”, but instead she added some background that illustrated why Reese yearned to experience motherhood. Now Peters feels there was no need to do so. A writer can create captivating, multifaceted characters by withholding their motives. Peters calls this approach “strategic opacity,” borrowing from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt.^# If you think about it, we rarely know why someone behaves the way they do. Even our own motives are often a mystery. By leaving the “why” unanswered, Peters says, she seeks to build a narrative larger than anything she could make with words, one that reaches out toward the sublime. Forging an open space that cannot be hemmed in by the limits of language—isn’t this what artists do, and how we invite readers in?