DMZ Colony was written by writer and translator, Don Mee Choi. Is it silly to say that it could not have been written by anyone else?
… the torturer asked… what if I smashed your head to bits?… I said… eee… ideology1
History is ever arriving.2
I present to you a correspondence of certain grave significance. It’s written in a foreign language. No translators are available.3
To translate is, supposedly, to render one language into another. Don Mee Choi refers to the act of translation as an “anti-neocolonial” mode. How are we to understand this designation? Should we take it to mean that translation is an act of radical empathy, one which transcends boundaries, languages, race?
DMZ Colony is an unclassifiable text, and so it must be classified as Poetry.
Poetry: any text which one cannot…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2023