Customer Reviews

Translating Mo'Um

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Collage, distortion, disjunction. Hong uses these techniques to present a pieced together body, an account of the immigrant experience through lenses of the grotesque. Translating Mo'um is a challenging collection of poems that maintain their reader's interest with moments of startling honesty and clarity, as the author translates, narrates and does battle with the traditions and histories she has inherited from her Korean background and the dictates of contemporary America where she lives. Hong's poetry is driven by passion, "Restraint turns passion into shame. Or worse, martyrs. My mother comes/from a country of martyrs, a (craze) of martyrs, a crateful of martyrs" and irreverence "Body electric my tantric ass".

Central to her approach is an interest in and identification with the grotesque, with "freaks" and the idea of spectacle from the inside and the outside, as something that is inhabited and observed. "Fragments of freaks: the Hottentot's ass,/the Siamese twins' toupee, the indecisive gap/who said I do. Later, no forget it, I don't." There are poems about the first Siamese twins, Change and Eng, and about the Venus Hottentot. The otherness that these subjects represent is akin to the experience of being an immigrant in a hostile culture, but Hong also reveals an association born of personal history in The Shameful Show of Tono Maria: "Still mute, I was sent to Special Ed/ with autistics, paraplegics, and a boy/who only ate dirt".

Themes of muteness, difficulty of speech weave throughout the collection. Hong mines the tension between words and body, exploring the embodiment of language and the linguistics of the body. Her poems raise questions of what happens to a body when it is transplanted and loses its language, how do words act as aphrodisiacs "you say it turns you on when I speak Korean" and how does one negotiate the shifting, divided body of biculturalism? The struggle to remain true, to understand one's origins, to inhabit the divided body, the divided self is a difficult one and Hong takes it on with clear-eyed vigor and fierce unsentimentality.

Do not expect a book on identity where chow mein + spaghetti = Asian American and everyone's tra-la-la happy. There is no such heartwarming treacle here.

Often, with so called Asian American literature, the critics opt for the easy reading, proclaim the text to be about "maintaining one's traditions," and "identity," then close the book. Mission accomplished. True, the book deals with these issues, and to a reader who fails to take a closer look, Translating Mo'um might seem familiar, monotonous, droning.

Instead of the either/or (either exclusively Asian or American) or the indefensibly simple-minded Asian + American = Asian American (yay!) perspectives, Ms. Hong writes from the Neither/Nor stance, neither Asian nor so-called American.

ski: poem
kkatchi: magpie
ayi: child

Here, there is always something lost in translation, in that "labor of crossing." Ms. Hong writes from that negative space in between. Note the epigraph by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: "She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech." That loss of agency where "the word / speaks / without you"

Before this turns into an academic paper, I'll just mention the book's preoccupation with the grotesque body, "...a body in the act of becoming." The quote is Bakhtin's and the idea is a keystone figure. To talk about desire in this book is to talk about the grotesque, and vice versa, which generates the nexus from which Ms. Hong discusses sexual repression, image control, and considers the question of where the power of speech as an act resides. Who decides what is grotesque, exotic, impossible, or desirable, and by what means?

As the context of Asian American life changes, so does the conditions of its problems. Though difficult at times, Ms. Hong's work finds a language with which one can begin to speak about that which has not been allowed to exist in a whole form: the Asian American; the Korean American female.

An excellent first book.

Cathy Hong's first book launches the reader into the shadowy boundaries of Asian-American identity. In many poems we get what seems to be autobiographical material that insists on its own aesthetic tint, miles and miles from more familiar confessional ground. A half-formed idea of the poet is constantly disrupted by blurred grammar, startling imagery, and jumps into the lives of other non-Euro-Americans (although those poems that primarily address these lives, "Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins" "Hottentot Venus" and "The Shameful Show of Tono Maria" make up the weakest writing in the collection), especially Asians, especially her mother. The effect is one of shift, not so much a multifaceted view of the bicultural experience as a multifogged one. Confusion in Hong's hands is not amateurish, however, but precisely controlled; one's sense of drifting between languages and multiply layered perspectives is palpable.

Technically, Hong demonstrates quite a palette. Almost nothing she writes escapes a surreal twist: "I grew a petri dish of princes, all replicating and jostling each oher for my hand" "winds / sprouted like weeds, while we sucked juice / from matronly oranges" "never the opaque doll but the battery that ran it" "We barely knew each other yet he confessed to me until his face clattered off like a hubcap." She's capable of a fluid music as well: "Palpitation, cyst, polyp: skin licked, / tongue pioneers among topographic pulp."

I could find no moment that threatened sentimentality, although many times I was left without an emotional response to the material - just a cerebral appreciation of her syntactic or imagistic manipulation. One weakness of the book it its occasional thematic monotony; I grew tired of reading about the men she'd slept with or who were attracted to her because of her ethnicity, as well as to sex words thrown in not so much as equals to their contextual elements (which would strip their taboos and return them to the everyday) as strategies to shock.

There is much to recommend this book: her lyricism is not abstruse, her autobiography not staid or precious, her metaphors fresh, and her control of language admirable.

I read Translating Mo'um in one sitting and was completely transfixed. I think it's a really strong debut collection that's full of frank and jagged energy. This book may be syntactically difficult but the imagery is often startling and compulsive. I recommend this book heartily. Ignore previous post. He obviously has petty grudges.

To suggest that Ms. Hong talks TOO MUCH about being found attractive by non-Asian Americans is almost to imply that she enjoys being fetishized, glories in it; a classic Western fallacy that is both self-serving and ethnocentric. This is like blaming the victim for rape. Rather than delight in the author's fetishization, I believe the book attempts to explore the mechanism of fetishization and objectification; the process, its drives, and products.

A wonderful book, I would give it six stars but I can't! I look forward to the next collection of this accomplished young poet.

This is a forceful and exciting collection by this emerging poet. I can't wait to see what she will bring out next.

It is surprising to me that this disparate collection somehow found a publisher. Disregard the positive reviewers who are not surprisingly all from places the author has lived in the course of her life. As a former student of the author, I can tell you she is motivated more by the impulse behind the writing, rather than the taughtness of the writing itself. Unless you have a relationship with the author, and have discussed the intended meanings of her works with her, there is little here that warrants more than an initial read. Sample the work at a bookstore before you 1-click an order for it... a quick skim will tell you all you need to know. While the author is a passable critic who excels at working a room and networking, her actualy writing itself is lacking.