Rob Wilson is a western Connecticut native who studied at the University of California at

Berkeley, where he was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has published
a book of poetry and prose with Mineumsa Press/ University of Hawai’i Press called Wak-
ing In Seoul. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was a
Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2010. A Chinese translation of his serial poem
When the Nikita Moon Rose appeared in Malaysia, and a set of Hawai’i-based poems in
Susan Schultz’s Tinfish anthology, Jack London Is Dead. He lives and works in Santa
Cruz, California—writing on edges of transpacific beatitude and “busy being reborn.”

C. Derick Varn: Why do you think Chinese and Korean literature in translation has not
done as well in the American and British markets as Japanese literature and do you see
this as changing?

Rob Wilson: A book that helped transform my understanding of Japanese literature, as cre-
ated and received in modern world literature terms that started in the nineteenth century and ex-
tended into much of the twentieth as a quasi-systematic frame, was Kojin Karatani’s Origins of
Modern Japanese Literature. He elaborates how, reflective of the literary-artistic dimension of
the quest for world modernity that saturated Meiji Japan, novelists absorbed the discourse of
self, landscape, body, and confession as a “semiotic constellation” that makes for “literature” as
such: so that when Natsume Soseki writes works like Kokoro or Light and Darkness, the whole
Western discursive apparatus of psychology, interiority, descriptive landscape, everyday setting,
and the will to articulate some kind of embodied subjective ‘truth’ is not outside Japan but al-
ready interiorized as a local-global situation to be engaged with in thick, specific Japanese
terms as what Jameson calls “form-problems.”

The struggle to overcome the modern in Japan resulted in novelists like Kawabata, Mishima,
and Oe, in other words, who already knew and embodied these Western narrative traditions of
narration and engaged with these terms in transformative and culturally situated ways, whether
in Oe’s “buttery” Western style or Kawabata’s more poetic mode of oblique understatement that
recalls haiku imagery. As an aesthetic subset of this, there is the whole fascination with Japa-
nese genres and traditions confronting Western modernity spearheaded in the West by Ernest
Fenellosa and his wake the polemics of Ezra Pound or even Gary Snyder. The contexts for
Kawabata’s and Oe’s winning the Nobel Prize in 1968 and 1994 respectively, had been set up
as it were both internally and externally for Japan to be recognized mimetically.

Lu Xun might well be interpreted as the ‘founder of discursivity’ in demotic language for modern
Chinese literature, akin to what Karatani has elaborated for Soseki in Japan—he certainly was
deserving of such broader international recognition, as signaled by Oe’s calling him “the great-
est writer Asia produced in the twentieth century.” The belated recognition of Chinese literature
as a modern and postmodern force will continue to be rectified or validated, as now seems the
case with Nobel prizes in 2000 and 2012.

When I taught in Korea in the early 1980s I was asked several times why Japanese literature
had been afforded such recognition whereas Korean and Chinese literature had not been; and
the answer that was promoted in the press (not by me) was that Korean writers needed to find a
translator like Edward Seidensticker, as if Seidensticker had won or deserved the award for his
skills. Pascale Casanova has pointed to the example of Korean literature as a minority form in a
minority language in her “world republic of letters,” in need of greater translation into French,
English, and Spanish to achieve systematic consecration.
Ko Un, it seems to me, is such a Korean poet of world importance, literary recalcitrance, and
cultural-political integrity deserving of such recognition on the multifarious Pacific Rim. To be
sure, translation can hardly begin to rectify or transform the huge asymmetrical powers of the
world literary system, especially for minor or indigenous or local works of amazing power like
Robert Sullivan’s Maori-based Star Waka or the works of caustic multi-generic scope like those
of Samoan novelist Albert Wendt. This interior Pacific is off the map of the literary world-sys-
tem, voided and avoided as such like some ‘Pacific beneath the European pavements’ I would
say, unless it wins the 1985 Booker Prize like Keri Hulme’s bone people, seemingly the only Pa-
cific work scholars like Casanova or Louis Menand have heard of. So we are damned with or
without such "world" systems in their reductive, foreclosed worlding of literature.

Do you see Korean literature or Chinese literature being able to make inroads through
the popularity of Korea- American and Chinese American writers such as Chang-Rae Lee
and Li-young Lee?

It could help. Both of these writers you mention have global and diasporic ties that inform how
they write and envision the world and/or the shaping of minority frames or poetics around Ko-
rean or Chinese American literature as such. Chang-rae Lee (born in Seoul) in particular from
Native Speaker to A Gesture Life and Aloft has been concerned with the complicated, dis-
crepant, shifting and shifty ties of US Korean immigrants to the right-left and South-North politics
in the ex-Korean homeland, the division system of cold war politics that shaped prior genera-
tions and that in some way still abides, the misrecognitions that racial formations are reductively
subjected to, the often erroneous burdens of autobiographical representation that are imposed
upon such minority writers to explain and contain them.

An internal US–identity frame is insufficient to grasp the geopolitics or social energies and flows
of such works; indeed such works help to resituate and “world” the US on and along the DMZ
that it still mars and maintains as a horizon of strategic dominion. Li-Young Lee’s own ties to the
Chinese diaspora into Indonesia and the United States complicate the whole making of a Chi-
nese-influenced poetics and any such linguistically oblique post- or anti-Mao politics as one con-
text.

Certainly, in global contexts, Koreans in South Korea or Chinese in Taiwan and the PRC have
become increasingly interested in these Asian American writers as carriers of a global diasporic
mandate, that complicates and transforms the very meaning of “Korean” or “Chinese” in decen-
tered transnational and polyvocal ways. To invoke an even stronger example, Ruth Ozeki is a
sophisticated, de-categorical, and uncanny Canadian American who writes about Japanese,
Canadian, and Japanese American cultures as transformed across a transnational-transpacific
nexus of interaction, as in the food industry, biotech, and agribusiness ties between the US and
Japan in My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. The fact that her recent A Tale for the Time
Being could be shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize in 2013 suggests the emergent global overlap
in which such back-and-forth Asia/Pacific works can and should be rightly appreciated, rather
than slotting them into pre-existing ethnic minority frames to contain them.

Such literature as such often exceeds the categories or genres that would read or arrange it.

What did you make of the controversies in English language media about Mo Yan being
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in regards to his relationship to the PRC and lack of
support for detained writers? Do you think this will continue to complicate Western re-
ception of Chinese literature? How does this compare with the prize being awarded
Gao Xingjian who was more controversy in Chinese speaking media but almost no con-
troversy in English and French media?

The PRC is one formation internally, and another no less geopolitically complicated and entan-
gled formation globally, even if we just consider its relation to Taiwan and Hong Kong not to
mention decentering relations to the diasporic Chinese, or the South China Seas build-up set
against Obama’s Pacific Pivot and so on. “The Pacific is big enough for all of us,” declared U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the 2012 Pacific Forum in Suva, which did not satisfy global-
izing China not to mention the smaller interior Pacific countries of Oceania wary of such unifying
US Rimspeak since the end of the Cold War.

I remember going with the editorial team of the emergent journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
(which by then had already established a substantial publishing record in the region and in the
broader global world of cultural studies) to Tsinghua University in Beijing to discuss with schol-
ars there the meanings of ‘doing cultural studies.’ Cultural studies in the PRC, we were told,
meant articulating the workers to the needs and demands of the party, and that if we wanted to
affiliate with their work it would be better to name our project “critical theory” and to drop the
name “cultural studies” from our masthead. Needless to say, we kept the name “cultural stud-
ies,” and continued to define this work or “worlding” project quite otherwise, more along Grams-
cian “counter-hegemonic” lines of trans-local affiliation and neoliberal critique. As I know from
my colleague Chris Connery, however, the work of cultural studies in sites like Shanghai or Bei-
jing now proliferates along such diverse critical lines, as discussed by trenchant scholars like
Wang Xiaoming and Dai Jinhua in the Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort coedited collection, Cre-
ativity and Academic Activism: Institututing Cultural Studies.

As for Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt has become the foremost translator and global-anglophone
mediator for such Chinese novelists in the world literature system, “becoming PRC Seiden-
sticker,” as it were, for the University of Hawai’i Press et al. Goldblatt concedes that Mo Yan
(like Zhang Yimou, maker of the pro-imperial film Hero or the Mo Yan-story based Red
Sorghum, long exposed by Rey Chow as a work of ‘self-orientalizing’ ethnography) operates
within a PRC state system of censorship and self-censorship. This long-committed translator
nonetheless urges that “Mo Yan writes in a gray area in which he avoids direct, overt criticism of
established institutions and policies while revealing social pathologies and what he has termed
a devolution of attitudes and behaviors in the PRC.”

This more oblique, quasi-Rabelaisian mode of irony, subtext, temporal displacement into a dif-
ferent era, black humor, satirical or fantastic distortion of theme, setting, and character, or cryp-
tic allegorization seems on the mark as narrative literary tactic within such a system. Others
feel that Mo Yan is too comfortable and passive with this large-scale censorship, as when he
suggested at his Nobel Prize speech in that it was no worse than an airport security system, that
is, easy to elude or get through (not so for cultural producers like Ai Weiwei, who lambasted this
award as “an insult to humanity and to literature”). Whether he is taken as a maker of “halluci-
natory realism” or the conformist flunky of an authoritarian state, Mo Yan’s claim that “Every-
thing I have to say is in my writing” makes sense.

In a sense, like I said above, “we are damned with or without such "world" systems in their re-
ductive, foreclosed worlding of literature,” as with the award to a diasporic Chinese novelist Gao
Xingjian in France or to Mo Yan inside the state. Not to award such a prize to Chinese writers
would be unconscionable, but to award one now is bound to generate controversy and resis-
tance, especially along the inside/outside fault-lines of global China, given PRC-China “becom-
ing global” in a high capitalist frenzy of forgetting Mao and remembering Confucius as it were.
What do you make of the way geopolitics, perhaps, over-determines reactions to East
Asian literature? Do you suspect that has anything to do with the reception to Japanese
literature we talked about in the first question?
That ‘overcoming modernity’ context for modernizing Japan reminds us that the production of
modern literature was caught up in the Asia Pacific force fields of imagining nationhood and
subjectivity in contact zones of geopolitical transformation and expansion the US was deeply in-
volved in via its own interlocking transformation and extra-territorial expansion and legitimation.
The rise of “area studies” in war time and post-war time contexts of containment and cultural-po-
litical saturation of the everyday only makes what you are calling ‘over-determination’ more pal-
pable.

The collection Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harrootunian put together called Learning Places: The
Afterlives of Area Studies, elaborates and challenges some of these frameworks in which the
humanities and cultural studies have been deeply engaged in transforming: to go beyond that
World War II production field/ learning place as an “entrenched structure” of language, history,
literature, and social sciences aimed at “gathering and providing information about the enemy”
as the editors summarized it. As Miyoshi noted, translators of Asian literature in this postwar
era were often behind-the-language “editors” emending, condensing, and ‘improving’ the origi-
nals to make them fit more globally recognized patters of high modernity.

Literature, it seems to me, all the more so these days takes place in this global/local/national
force-field which does not so much ‘over-determine’ but semi-determine the aesthetic field of
production, enacting a kind of semi-autonomy of transformation. Literary and aesthetic judg-
ments and tactics of reading and recognition are no less so caught up in these same force-
fields.

How much damage do you think these over-translations did to the understanding of the
literature? I am particularly of thinking of Pound's translation of Chinese poetry or some
of the Beat's translations of Japanese poetry.

I must admit I am particularly moved and engaged by Pound’s image-soaked “over-translations”

in Cathay and feel you could recapitulate the whole history of imagistic prosody and syntax via
his translation of Li Po’s “River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” into a modern idiom. No less so, you
could probably study the whole Beat movement and Beat engagement with zen philosophy and
poetry via a sustained reading of Gary Snyder’s translations of Han Shan into a “cold mountain”
figure of “beat” mountain-mindedness in engagement with city civilization. Kerouac’s Dharma
Bum is one such elaboration of Snyder’s Han Shan into a Cold War beat figure. Jack Spicer’s
“over-translation” of Lorca into “After Lorca” contains the tactics of Lorca re-situated into the
American deconstructive/ re-sacralized scene in that same Beat era. These are all examples of
what Robert Lowell called “Imitations,” unfaithful in any strict ways to the original but turning the
source into a vortex of meaning and influence in a new global context. It gets a bit routinized
when a singularity of a poet like W. S. Merwin turns any poet he translates into another version
of W. S. Merwin whether from Spanish or Sanskrit or French and so on. It begins to reek of
what Heidegger lamented as the Romanizing appropriation of Greek sources into the language-
of-dominion over world being, something Americans are quite capable of however grandly or
blandly so.

About two years ago, I have a brief online spat about the negative influence of Zen poetry
on American poetry with poet and translator Sam Hamil. The issue I had is that felt like
the aesthetic was overused and was depleted in power. Sam disagreed with me, and
probably rightly so. I bring this up as what do you see as some of negative influences of
post-Beat appropriations of particularly Chinese and Japanese traditional poetry?

I would tend to agree with your critique of the more recent Zen-influenced American version as
closer to an aestheticizing quietism that runs dangerously close to an Orientalist fantasy of what
Zen stood for in social contexts then or now. My own sense of what Gary Snyder was doing in
his translations of Han Shan as a “beat” figure of mountain-minded dialectics was part of a
process that would transform the “dharma bum” figure of meditative beatitude and solitary deso-
lation into the “dharma revolutionary” figure of Earth House Hold who would bring together these
two into some kind of pragmatic and dialectical poetics of engagement cum meditation. As Sny-
der urged in “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” sounding a bit like that visionary “boy
scout” poet as Jack Spicer called him, “The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the
mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.” Han
Shan gets supplanted by the Japanese beat activist poet, Nanao Sakaki, whose work with Sny-
der on the Banyan Ashram leads towards the transpacific Bay Area vision of planetary and re-
gional ecopoetics Snyder will activate in the High Sierras, again embodying and transmitting
both strands. That wholeness of vision, inward and outward connection of energies and pow-
ers, is what gives Snyder’s work uncanny relevance then and now. Some of the Zen-drenched
poetry you allude to comes closer to pastoral retreat to inwardness and green epiphany, aligned
to what Ron Silliman lambasts as the American lyric “school of quietism” and evasion.

Returning to Korean literature for a minute, I have thought the late 2000's translations of
Kim Young-Ha's works, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and Your Republic Is Calling
You, were truly excellent and vivid in English. Given what I know about Korean, that's a
fairly impressive feat, what do you make of Kim's reception in English?

The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism—a strange late capitalist mix, that’s
for sure—has been pouring money into the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and these
better or more professionally worldly translations may be situated more broadly as a reflection of
this larger drive towards international recognition for Korean literary culture, which is deep and
abiding, ever-emergent. The less Confucian in form and content, the better, I might opine, as in
the risky or more subterranean works of Kim Young-Ha as translated by Chi-young Kim into an-
guished suave English. Kim was also a professor of Drama at the Korean National University of
the Arts, which I experienced from having been a visiting professor teaching Asia Pacific cultural
studies in the Film program there led by the innovative feminist film scholar and maker Kim So-
Young. KNUA is a virtually a creative seed-bed of prolific cultural works and uncanny genres
that have “organic” ties to Korean history and cultural-political problematics. Whether Kim
Young-Ha prefigured or refracted this work, that is his generation’s quasi-filmic, late-capitalist
urban, reflexively postmodern, and global/local postcolonial context, “killer capitalism on the Pa-
cific Rim” it might be called. The work in many genres goes way beyond anything the govern-
ment might want to fund, control, or nurture in its criticality and transgressive power. Transla-
tions of these novels into English, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, Spanish,
and Vietnamese suggest their world resonance and quality of intervention into the contemporary
and divided world, Korea.

Conversely do you see literature from African or Latin American beginning to have real
influence in Asia, or is it still mostly dominated by English and local literature?
Your assumption of the local and indigenous languages and literatures interacting with the An-
glophone modern and postmodern traditions probably holds weight across the region, except for
the increasing interaction of influences and forms along the “inter-Asian” nexus, meaning the
linkages of sites like Taiwan to Japan and Korea and of course the PRC and Hong Kong as well
as the USA and UK postcolonial.

The Bandung Conference of 1955 of nonaligned and emergent nations in between the pores or
grasp of the postwar US and USSR empires presupposed “Asian-African” alliances and modes
of coalitional independence and pushed writers like Richard Wright at once towards Mochtar Lu-
bis from Indonesia and Amilcar Cabral from the Portuguese colonies of Africa. Such alliances
along Third and Fourth world lines of tactic and influence, in a shared “struggle for liberation,”
also came to the foreground in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which leads a
scholar of world postcoloniality like Robert Young to say we should thus call such emergent
world literature “tricontinental” rather than the more accommodating “postcolonial” as such.
These modes of world solidarity between and across the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin
American seem unlikely if not impossible these days to the fragmented multitudes of the literary
imagination, at a time when, as Fredric Jameson ruefully noted, “it is easier [for writers] to imag-
ine the end of the world than alternatives to global capitalism,” and some end-time ecological
jeremiad calls out as genre across the planetary anthropocene.

What do you make of the exclusion of most of South East Asia from discussion of con-
temporary Asian literature? With the exception of India, there seems to be little schol-
arly or public involvement on the topic?

“Asia” is an impossible if necessary category, enacting arbitrary and power-laden inclusions and
exclusions from its origins in Greece down to its present iterations when East Asia and China
seem to dominate. Asia is a catachresis as Gayatri Spivak tracks it in Other Asias, even as she
attempts to include, compare, and translate ‘other Indias’ inside what gets taken as the literature
of India within the dominant Anglophone frameworks of comparative literature. Inter-Asia Cul-
tural Studies journal has worked responsibly to expand, complicate, and interconnect across
what has been taken as “Asia” since the mid 1990’s in ways that go far beyond the Euro-Ameri-
can production of “Asia” that seems to reign as well in the generation and translation of Asian lit-
erature. Cultural studies formations like this deconstruct, historicize, and go far beyond the
“worlding” production of regions, disciplines, and areas in literary studies or the ‘world republic
of letters’ which is one reason I am drawn to this work as a kind of theory-rich, emergent, and
reflexively politicized poetics.