• E J Koh The Magical Language Of Others
• Ej Koh The Magical Language Of Others Full
• Ej Koh The Magical Language Of Others Book

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It has been several years since a book compelled me to stay awake into the wee hours of the morning finishing it, and yet E.J. Koh’s extraordinary, magnanimous memoir, The Magical Language of Others, did just that. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others is told with an alchemical blend of clarity and weight that must be the product of her training both as a poet and as a translator. Koh builds a deep, subtle emotional resonance with a surgical delicacy that will resonate long after you finish the last page. Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com. Book review: The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir — by E. Koh Mon, - 11:00am meganj The full text of this article is only available to online subscribers.

The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh's parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love--letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.

As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history--her grandmother Jun's years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre--and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words--in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language--to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?

The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing--in Eun Ji Koh--a singular, incandescent voice.

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About the Author

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.”

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.

E J Koh The Magical Language Of Others

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.”

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.”

Ej Koh The Magical Language Of Others Full

E.J. Koh with Rich Smith
Jan 7, Elliott Bay Book Company, Free

Ej Koh The Magical Language Of Others Book