Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

Activist poetic translation, like activist poetry, activates our ability to know history through the unique embodied, enfleshed, sensual experience of a poem’s sonority, visuality, and the relationship between the two. This is why we hold poetry readings in solidarity with peoples living through conflict. It doesn’t “do anything” for them in an obvious sense, but it’s important for humanity that we absorb this historical knowledge as embodied experience… READ MORE

Part of the problem of translation and money and recognition as intellectual labor is that translation is private, doesn’t occupy a public space, and that, ontologically, the work itself takes place outside of, between, and together. It has two places where its traces are evident, but where it is never at the same time. In this sense, it is unlocatable… READ MORE

When Hopscotch suggested writing about the book, I became curious what such a note might look like. Not just because the book contains my translations of Swahili rap songs and translations of my interviews with pioneering Swahili rappers and producers. It also explores how Swahili rappers “translated” American hip-hop to an East African context… READ MORE

The 이야기 I’ve written in this collection are a little different from the ordinary kind. These stories have neither inciting incident nor conclusion. Nor do the individual sentences stand in ordinary causal relationship to one another. Each story is a “leaning in to whisper.” An intimate gesture to convey the vastness of the field that is the human heart, an unfathomable universe impossible to encompass… READ MORE