An engaging, literary take on language and its role in the diaspora of a scattered family, The Magical Language of Others speaks from—and to—the heart. Koh is 14, her father lands a lucrative three-year contract with a Korean company in Seoul. The Magical Language of Others, E J Koh (Tin House Books, January 2012) Koh’s prose is elegant and beautiful. Forgiveness becomes a major theme of the memoir; it’s through Koh’s undergraduate and graduate studies in poetry, creative writing, and translation that she learned more about the realms of forgiveness. The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir (Hardcover) By E. Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days. 'The Magical Language of Others' explores selfhood, language, and family bonds - New Day NW E.J. Koh's poetic memoir asks, 'Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin.
Though she was teaching at Hugo House and she’d finished an MFA in poetry and translation at Columbia University, E.J. Koh wasn’t sure she wanted to continue writing. “I was going through a really deep sense of depression,” she told me. “And I think I had taken writing to such an extent that it was no longer helping me with anything.” So she quit for six months.
Then late at night in 2016 she went on Twitter: “I’m writing a thousand love letters. Tell me about yourself, add a question/struggle & your mailing address.” The requests poured in from South Korea, the UK, Canada, “even someone who’s just across the street from me.”
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Koh has since published a collection of poetry, A Lesser Love, and today she releases a memoir, The Magical Language of Others. Tonight, at Elliott Bay Book Company, she’ll hold a release party, talking with The Stranger’s Rich Smith. In the book, between chapters telling of her growing up, she translates letters that her mother sent her from Korea when Koh was young. Yet until recently, she hadn’t realized the parallels, both in form—Koh’s love letters (she’s done 103 so far) run about two pages, the same as her mother’s—and intent: Late in the book a teacher tells her, “You can say anything you want—with magnanimity.' That feels, by the time you reach it, like a guiding statement. This is a book, in part, about words as an offering.
The Magical Language of Others is only about 200 spare pages, but never feels slight. It skips through Koh’s life. She did not speak until around age five. When she was 15, her parents moved back to South Korea for work, leaving her in California with her older brother to raise her, which devastated her. The letters her mother sent her were from overseas, when Koh’s Korean was nascent enough that she had to read the letters aloud to understand them. Until this book, she had not responded. She went to Japan and studied Japanese, refusing to eat in a restaurant until she could order properly. “If I could not learn a language,” she writes, “why bother with a complete meal?” She competed as part of a hip-hop dance group in L.A. She stumbled from that into poetry as a form of therapy, then to translation.
But it reaches beyond those borders, detailing how her grandmother was caught between Japanese and Korean identity and how she had to flee the Jeju Island massacre in 1948. Koh explores the ways that the “present is the revenge of the past,” how pain echoes between generations and how this can manifest in languages. She spoke English and her father learned it. His mother spoke Japanese, while Koh's mother spoke Korean. “They sort of hated each other,” she says of her grandmother and mom, for reasons that she later discovered were rooted in violence between the two countries. At the University of Washington, she’s now working on her PhD, looking at the “untranslatability of certain words that represent either trauma or love.” Translation is political, she says, containing the history of the languages you're working with.
Growing up with that clear understanding of the power and pain of language—an instrument of animosity—seems a fine way to forge a writer of intensity. See how Koh deals with her own birth: “The crown of my head split a fissure, and when my shoulders passed through, I nearly killed her. Broad, swathed in muscle and green veins, I was hairless except for the faint whiskers of eyebrows.” But a teacher tells her late in the book, “If you want to be a good poet, write poetry. If you want to be a great poet, then translate.” Download apple driver.
The Magical Language of Others shows Koh working a language that moves beyond the violence of the past, toward a generosity, in part through the translation of her mother’s words, which become her own. “To my limits, I do not see my translations as complete,” she writes in her introductory note. “If her letters could go to sleep, my translations would be their dreams.”
E.J. Koh with Rich Smith
Jan 7, Elliott Bay Book Company, Free
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When E. J. Koh was 15, her parents returned to South Korea for a lucrative work opportunity, leaving Koh and her older brother behind in California. The job placement was supposed to be temporary, but Koh’s parents remained in South Korea for seven years. Now, as an adult, Koh has crafted a stunning memoir in which she delves into the pain of being apart from her parents and examines what longing and separation have meant for her family.
The Magical Language of Others (Tin House, 1/7/20) alternates between Koh’s translations of the Korean letters written to her by her mother during their period of separation and Koh’s narrative chapters, which recount her childhood and her family history, and explore the ways that language, hunger, hidden identities, and intergenerational trauma link the women in her family.
The letters that serve as the backbone of the book come across as odd to an outside reader – especially at first – which establishes that this relationship will never be fully understood by the reader; indeed, the author, herself, is still working through the meaning of the letters and that period of separation from her mother. Each time the reader becomes wrapped up in the narrative story, the letters remind the reader in no uncertain terms: these people are real. They are complicated. Each letter is a harsh entry back into reality, into the life of a 15-year-old and her mother, as they tried to make sense of the distance between them.
In earlier drafts, the book comprised only the 49 translated letters from her mother, but the narrative chapters Koh added, in which she digs deeper into her family history, work in beautiful symbiosis with the letters. Much like Koh’s poetry, her prose has remarkable clarity and precision. The book is slim but is packed with scenes that reflect on how we hide and reveal identity through language, the value of work, physical and emotional hunger, and the ways in which we create pain for others to assuage. In one memorable scene, Koh’s mother (as a child) cuts holes in her socks so they need to be mended, in order to generate an excuse to visit her own mother who left the family and lives separately. Understanding that Koh’s mother felt abandoned as a child gives meaning to the advice Koh’s mother gives her: “While your parents are alive, eat as much of their love as you can, so it can sustain you for the rest of your life.”
Despite covering several generations, the memoir doesn’t feel scattered, since each chapter is laser-focused. Koh describes her memoir as “a single, knife-like shard of a larger piece of our family and history.” Indeed, like a core sample of the earth that shows different geological layers over time, the reader gets to see a slice of her family in different generations and trace the same themes throughout. The influence of language on identity, for example, can be seen in all the womens’ stories. As Koh writes, “Languages, as they open you, can also allow you to close.” For her great-grandparents, the ability to project a certain identity through language was life-saving during the Kanto Massacre. Meanwhile, for Koh, the study of translation provides her with a better understanding of language, and ultimately, her facility with words allows her to be forgiving.
Magical Language Of Others
The most remarkable aspect of this memoir is Koh’s ability to write about trauma graciously. Rather than focusing on the outcome of these painful events, which could lead to judgement, Koh reaches back to find the source, which instead fosters understanding. In an interview with Electric Literature, Koh explains, “Though it seems like I read and write about the saddest things and speak to those with the saddest stories, the thing we always come back to is love. When I am studying about trauma, I am also studying about love—about care in the everyday, forgiveness and letting go… Even for the most brutal chapters in the memoir, there are edges of light—certain love and care.”
The Magical Language Of Others By E.j. Koh
Koh is able to take fragments and scenes from the lives of the women in her family and weave an intergenerational story that is at once cutting and uplifting, concise and expansive, astute and non-judgemental. Pain and healing live together on the page. As Koh’s mother told her on the day they first parted, “We will look back at our time apart and laugh together and be sad, but we will have many stories. If you have no suffering, you have no story to tell – isn’t it true?”
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