Trans poetics, translation & jellyfish: an interview with three trans poets

This September I had the pleasure of being invited to Brick Lane Bookshop by Two Lines Press to celebrate the launch of their new title 'Splendor: Trans Poets', a collection of writing gathering together the work of five trans poets from Denmark, Argentina, Korea, Norway and Quebec in English translation for the first time. The collection traverses transformation and change, the bodily and everything that comes with that. At the launch I was one of 5 UK-based writers who each read excerpts from the new anthology, as well as our own work. Holding the work of trans writers from other countries in my mouth felt like a connection, a link made, community across borders.

Following the launch, I spoke to three of the book's wonderful contributors: Luka Holmegaard, Kim Sono and Ida Hove Solberg. We discussed the experience of being translated, the place of words in the fight for trans rights and the formation of identity, and trans poetics.

Translation feels, to me, like a creative bridge. Two languages come together. Something is made understood. How does it feel to have your work translated into another language? What does it mean to you?

Ida: As a translator myself, I am acutely aware of the labor and love that lies in translating someone else’s poetry. To be on the other end of that kind of relationship is a very moving experience, I find. Olivia has transformed these poems with such care, both for the themes and the sounds and specific wordings, and she has brought a much-needed playfulness to the task of creating new texts that carry the nerve and tone of every single poem.

I am very fascinated by how the poems remain themselves while becoming new and different versions. And yes, herein lies something very queer! As humans, we translate ourselves for others all the time, as a way of connecting, but as non-binary, gender-nonconforming, and trans people, many of us experience that we also need to translate ourselves for ourselves. And at the same time, like a well-translated poem, we remain the same.

Sono (Kim): Reading one’s own work in another language is, to me, one of the most beautiful experiences a writer can have. When I receive a translation, I especially love sitting with it and reading aloud the lines of my poems in that other language. It is wondrous to experience, through my own voice, the moment when the images, ideas, narratives, and rhythms made by the resonance between my body and Korean take on another body: a language with different sounds and shapes.

Every language carries, deep within it, the concrete lives of those who have used it, along with the shared sensations embodied by a linguistic community. Translation, especially poetry translation, is not simply a matter of making an original text intelligible. It asks how histories, cultures, and ideas can be carried across as sensation. Translation cannot be judged only by success or failure. It is more like an uneven surface, shaped by the contexts selected or set aside in every sentence and word. Still, through the opportunities I have had over the past few years to look closely at translation, I have come to feel that language can make contact between souls possible, even when we have different faces, and have lived through different cultures, times, and places. I find it beautiful that human beings have kept attempting translation as a practice of connection between communities.

The fact that I have been able to admire translation so deeply, and think about it with such care, is thanks to the extraordinary translator Eunice Lee. To be able to work with her continuously is one of the greatest fortunes of my life. She is both a translator and a poet, with a sharp, thoughtful intelligence that can sense the many textures of a poem, and with the remarkable talent to create new rhythms and meanings in the translated language. Sometimes I even prefer her translations of my poems to the Korean originals. Through the English sentences of my poems that have passed through Eunice’s body and mind, I often come to sense the poems themselves more vividly. I am truly happy to be able to explore the soft and open possibilities of poetry with someone as brilliant as her. A poem is like the delicately arranged and attuned remains of a being. So I believe that she surely carries a piece of my soul.

Luka: It means the world to me to be translated, honestly. It's been beautiful and so rewarding every time it's happened - I always understand new things about the work from the process. In the literary world the glass ceiling is on the floor for trans writers for the most part. So few of us get to publish, let alone publish with commercial publishers or be

translated. We desperately need to expand our horizons, and have more work by trans writers available in more languages. Splendor is a contribution to that and I am thrilled to take part. 

We are living in a particularly difficult time for our community. What do you think literature can offer our community? Where do our words fit in the fight for trans rights?

Sono (Kim): After 'Splendor: Trans Poets' was published, I saw on social media that many trans readers were coming to readings across the English-speaking world to hear the poems included in this book. I was surprised and deeply happy. As someone who writes poetry, I often feel powerless in the face of the fact that poetry sometimes seems unable to do anything in this world. I am deeply grateful to Two Lines Press for making this book, and

the poems in it, occasions for encounter and mingling.

One thing I found especially interesting is that my poems included in the book, “Taming

Flesh,” “One,” and “Two,” were written as locally specific poetic practices. They reconstruct, through poetry, the Korean culture of taemong, or “birth dreams”: an oral

dream culture in which symbolic figures that appear in a parent’s dream are read through the gender binary as signs of a fetus’s sex, and through which the child to be born is welcomed in advance. As far as I know, there is no equivalent culture or symbolic system of taemong in the Anglophone world. And yet several readers have told me that, even without explanation, they could sense something queer or trans in the poems I wrote. I think poetry can become a space where the shared bodily sensations of queer people, and especially trans people, can unfold and resonate.

Poetry also does not require a fixed physical space. Anyone can memorize it, write it down, or read it aloud. Because of this, poetry seems to me a medium especially suited to sharing the feeling that we are together beyond the limits of borders and languages. And despite the many formal experiments that have continued throughout literary history, poetry is, in the end, voice. It is a genre human beings invented because we wanted to hear one another’s voices, and because we wanted to speak. Through poetry, we may be able to see and hear more clearly. We may be able to see and hear one another better, and other readers of these poems may also come to see and hear us better.

Because poetry moves toward the place where language is absent, and because I still

feel that there is not enough language in this world for trans people, I believe trans poetry can allow trans people to exist in more concrete ways. Poetry is also a genre that tries to move beyond the body. The force of poetry always reaches beyond the body of the person writing it. The gesture of poetry, wanting to become a bird, or a tree, or in any case to move somewhere beyond given bodily conditions, feels very close to the gender performance of trans people. For me, the poetic is queer. That is where my poetics begins.

Luka: Literature and the arts has a practical and highly important role in the resistance and

community work I see happening these years. There are lots of reasons to gather - in

protest, for sit-ins, in reflection and mourning, for gathering funds - and having readings, concerts and shows are a great way of getting people out the door. Literature is beautiful and makes our world more thoughtful and fun. To keep doing hard things I think we need those sentiments with us. 

Across 'Splendor' you explore being, becoming. What does writing offer to the formation of your identity?

Ida: When I write, I feel connected to a vast queer lineage of writers. I believe our need to

both express and shape our worlds has always been strong, perhaps increasingly the

further out in the margins we find ourselves. Writing for me, then, is a way of choosing

who or what is at the center of the universe. It might be a hare, it might be the ground

beneath our feet or the bodies these feet carry, or it might be the precarious position of

someone lacking or losing their rights. In that way, writing becomes a way of

recalibrating my own world view, and maybe somebody else’s too.

Luka: I'm a late-ish trans/queer bloomer and came to queerness in literature long before I understood who I was in life. When I was in my 20s and went to writing school and started publishing, I thought so many times: Why do I keep liking and reading all this gay stuff?! Safe to say there was not a lot of transness going on around me. I felt the world of writing was a place where I could keep and grow all the things that seemed too complex for the rest of my life. I loved it to some extent, but it also became a confinement that I needed to break out of. The world of literature can offer nuance and complexity, but nuance and complexity can't get stuck in the world of literature. The rest of life needs this, too. 

What advice would you give to aspiring and early-career trans writers?

Sono (Kim): The unexplained part of yourself is the place where your literature begins. I hope you can believe that the strength to look into that place deeply, carefully, and for a long time already exists within you.

Luka, for me, water feels like a special sort of place for trans bodies, a genderless space despite so much gender being built around it in the form of swimwear and changing rooms. What does water and swimming mean for you as a trans person?

Luka: I wrote The Ocean in Your Mouth the spring and summer I started taking testosterone. I was working on a novel at the time, I was quite far along in the process, but had to drop it - I felt like my language was breaking apart, like a river thawing after the winter. There were all these jolts back and forth between intense feeling and old dissociation. I started writing these short texts every time I went swimming. Being in the water is an ultra complex sensory experience - how do you actually describe the feeling of floating? - but quotidian at the same time. It felt like a doorway into writing the experience of transition. Also, I think of water as something that seems, for lack of a better word, universal, and holy. Transitioning, and specifically the hormones part, is the closest I ever came to having a spiritual experience, and the motif of water seemed so right for exploring that.

Water appears to be a place of personal revelation, but also a place very much shared with friends and community in your writing. Your friends' voices are present in the text, quoted. Can you talk more about this sense of personal reflection vs community space?

Luka: The book has been a collective project, both in the process of making it and after. The

experiences it revolves around were so concretely difficult to describe in words for me, and as a poet I needed help to find the right phrases. Luckily I have brilliant friends, and many offered sentences that flowed into the book. After the publication some friends and I made the book into a performance piece, and several great trans musicians across Scandinavia have made lyrics out of the text. It's an honor to make something that people want to take further and work with. I also think this collectivity echoes something about the place in life where the book is written from. It's this tender spot just in the middle of all the changes, where you are on a carousel and the world around you is also spinning really fast, and you need each other to make sense of what is happening.

Ida, your poetry holds so much tenderness alongside so much anger at the rampant transphobia present today. How do you weave these two feelings together in your work?

Ida: To me these two aspects are so closely connected with each other, and yet I feel stretched thin trying to hold them together when I write. So many fragile things are of great value and in need of tenderness to be seen and to survive, but somehow the tenderness may be fueled by anger towards the threats against these things. Or vice versa, the anger is fueled by the power of tenderness. They work together in some way, like alternating current.

You use space beautifully in your poetry, and, to me, it creates a sense of

possibility, room to forge ourselves, to unfurl. What does the space on the page

mean to you?

Ida: I love that way of looking at space on the page. To me it has to do with rhythm and

movement, of the eyes and of the breath, as well as being about shapes and the

associations they can create. It is a physical thing, on the paper and in the body of the

reader, and it holds a layer of meaning that is not spelled out in words but rather alluded

to through form. But, like you say, it can also be a metaphysical thing, a room in which

to create or rest, or both.

Sono (Kim), animals figure regularly in your writing: the watchful jellyfish, the speaking koi, the live-in stork. Why do you, as a writer and as a trans writer particularly, connect to these animals, these underwater and airborne creatures, so much?

Sono (Kim): As I mentioned earlier, the animals that appear in these poems are beings that have circulated as symbols within the Korean culture of taemong, or birth dreams. Other animals also appear in my poetry collection Word Dream Body. For example, when a tiger appears in the dream of a pregnant person, it has traditionally been read as a strong sign that a son will be born. By contrast, small and pretty things such as peaches or jewels have been read as signs of a daughter’s birth. Until quite recently in Korea, the ratio of male births was much higher, in part because sex-selective abortion persisted when a fetus was identified as female. The gendered symbols in taemong could also become a basis for that violence.

From an outside perspective, this may look like an archaic or shamanistic practice. But rather than simply criticizing this particular Korean culture, I also felt there was something in it I wanted to hold on to. Through taemong, a community welcomes a child before birth; and I believe the small narrative practice of “telling dreams” can hold a resistant force against the grand narratives that organize history, society, and politics.

My parents did not have a taemong announcing my birth. When my younger brother was conceived, however, my mother and father both, amazingly, dreamed of a chestnut, a

symbol that clearly indicated a son. Perhaps this was because I am nonbinary, and cannot be captured by the symbolic system of the gender binary. So I thought I could reconstruct the empty space in my personal narrative as a poetic practice, by queering and rewriting the symbols that appear in taemong. This is why symbols from birth dreams, that is, animals, appear so often in this collection. The koi, too, is a Korean taemong symbol of a son’s birth. The jellyfish, however, is not actually a traditional taemong symbol. It is an animal friend I deliberately brought into the book, because its transparency and fluidity felt very queer to me. I imagine Two Lines Press chose the jellyfish for the cover image because that sensation resonated with them as well. By allowing the jellyfish to enter into a new relationship with the speaker, I wanted to write, through poetry, a new birth-dream narrative for queer people.

The stork comes from the Western myth that storks deliver babies. Until recently, I thought the stork was also a traditional Korean symbol. Perhaps this could be called a success story of translated literature. By describing the stork not as a being that brings a child, but as a being that brings a broad bone, that is, a kind of death, I wanted to look into the literary space created by that reversed narrative and image.

Apart from this, I have always been interested in nonhuman animals and the worlds of sensation they inhabit. If there is any way for humanity to be saved, as it accelerates its

own end through the climate crisis, the development of AI, hate crimes, and war, I believe it may come from cultivating the capacity to connect with and listen to the senses of nonhuman animals. I also think that trans ways of sensing, like those of nonhuman animals, make up a space whose depths and widths this society has not yet recognized. Perhaps that is why I sometimes feel closer to animals than to humans.

There is so much companionship and intimacy in the way you write animals and their relationships with people. It feels very trans to me, the way these creatures grace your poems, accepted onto the page as they are, unlikely relationships made inevitable. Can you tell us more about your process? How do these relationships and characters form on the page?

Sono (Kim): I am very happy and grateful that you read them that way. Across all four poetry collections I have published, I have continued a linguistic practice in which the agent and the object exchange positions within the poem. Spaces or objects, which have usually been treated as passive objects, move, perform, and sense before the poetic speaker or the human does; meanwhile, the speaker or human reduces their voice and scale, and moves more quietly, more passively.

At the atomic level, I, the jellyfish, a stone, and the chair I am sitting on right now are

all temporary combinations. At the quantum level, even what we call reality becomes

unstable. Everything that makes up this world is a knot tied for a little while. I believe

that if we could sense this deeply, a certain respect would arise on its own.

We have developed language in ways that widen the gap between the world and the human, and in ways that enlarge human self-consciousness. But the language of poetry can become one practice through which we narrow the distance modern language has

opened between the world and the human, and through which we recover our relationship with nature. I believe in this capacity of poetic language. Reverie and politics can coexist and combine within poetry. That is why I trust and love poetry more than anything.

Buy your copy of 'Splendor: Trans Poets' from Two Lines Press here.

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Finn Brown’s (they/them) writing lives in publications including Queer Life, Queer Love 2, The Raven Review, Tough Poets Review, Booth Journal, Meniscus Journal and Snowflake Magazine. Their writing has been shortlisted for the Creative Future 2024 Writers' Award and commended for the Moth Short Story Prize 2025. They were longlisted for the Moniack Mhor 2026 Emerging Writer Award and won a London Writers’ Centre 30th Anniversary Commission. They are the co-founder, editor and designer at t’ART.