Thereโs something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. Youโre free to float to the moon and evaporate or sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean. But youโre free to explore. Some people confuse that with drifting, I suppose. I like to think of it as growing.
Deborah SmithPlus, publishing's inherent conservatism, means that what little did get through was weighted towards the commercial end of the scale, which is not the kind of writing that excites me.
Deborah SmithSo the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous.
Deborah SmithWhenever I visit Korea she [Kang] buys me lunch and takes me to a gallery. As if all this wasn't enough, she has incredible respect for translation as a creative, artistic practice - she insists that each English version is 'our book', offered to share her fees with me when she found out I wasn't getting paid for translating her publicity stuff, always asks the editor to credit me, and does so herself whenever she's interviewed. Too good to be true.
Deborah SmithThere's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated.
Deborah Smith