Jennifer Hayashida
Om Jennifer Hayashida
Poet, translator and visual artist Jennifer Hayashida was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed her M.F.A. in poetry from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is the author of the poetry collection A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean, 2018) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor, 2020).
She is most recently the translator, from the Swedish, of Ida Börjel's Ma (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), Iman Mohammed's Behind the Tree Backs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022), and Elin Cullhed's Euphoria (Canongate, 2022). With Andjeas Ejiksson, she is the Swedish co-translator of Don Mee Choi's Knappt krig (forthcoming from 20TAL) and Kim Hyesoon's Autobiografi av död (20TAL, 2022). Other work includes translations of Athena Farrokhzad, Fredrik Nyberg, Burcu Sahin, Solmaz Sharif, Katarina Taikon, Lawen Mohtadi, Eva Sjödin, and Karl Larsson.
Her poetry and translations have been published in journals such as The Asian American Literary Review, Salt Hill, Chicago Review, and Circumference, while her collaborations in film/video have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including the Centre Pompidou, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the New Museum, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She is the recipient of awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and MacDowell. She serves on the editorial board of the Swedish literary publication Tydningen.
Her doctoral research project, Feeling Translation, is a durational public project investigating the act of translation as a site of social change through literary translation, pedagogical initiatives, and cross-genre writing. Feeling Translation proposes that translation enact an intervention, not merely by excavating the obscure or the radical, but by foregrounding the translator as a racialized, classed, and gendered political subject – not the purportedly neutral postracial technician of our collective literary imagination. This project seeks to produce a critical, even insurgent, translation practice against liberal dictates of “world literature” and contemporary art that focus on the subject of the text or biography of the author/artist. By foregrounding autoethnographic ontologies of translation vis-à-vis multilingualism, experiences of forced displacement, and racialized national scripts, Feeling Translation suggests that translation offers opportunities for insurgence aligned with feminist, queer, and decolonial thinking and praxis. The intention is for Feeling Translation to serve as a laboratory for enacting a sustainable decolonization of translation practices, literary and otherwise, by staging multi-modal critiques of existing nation-state models of linguistic belonging, especially as they are figured through literature in translation and the pedagogy of translation in Sweden.
Supervisors: Nils Olsson & Kristina Hagström-Ståhl
Recent publications/exhibitions include:
“Translating Crisis: Anti-Black Racism Against Asians in Neoliberal Sweden” in Global Anti-Asian Racism, ed. Jennifer Ho (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023)
“Men du är ju chinkipan” in Ord & Bild (Fall 2022)
“All Students and Employees…Are to Have Equal Rights and Opportunities: Translating the Poetics of Neoliberal Academese” in New Perspectives on Academic Writing, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)
One Is Not Born a Child/Man föds inte till barn text & audio piece included in the group exhibition Tevetrampolinen/The TV Trampoline (2021-2023: Fabrika Moscow; Kalmar konstmuseum; Bildmuséet i Umeå; Norrtälje konsthall)
“The Here and There: On Refugees and Translation” in The Margins (Fall 2021)
“Skisser: Until Then, There Is This” in Tydningen #36 (Spring 2021)
“Maskätna ord / Maskäten oro: A Glossary” in Återskall / Again Bark: Läsningar och svar på Imri Sandströms Det kommande skallet / The Coming Shall (2020)
“Removal, Refusal, Rehearsal: 15 Fridays” in Women & Performance: Performances of Contingency: Feminist Relationality and Asian American Studies After the Institution (Volume 30, 2020)
“Tillsammans Means Overlapping Edges, as in Tiles or Scales: Feeling Translation” in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly (Fall/Winter 2019)
“Translating Asian American Archival Poetics” in Tydningen #33/34 (Winter 2019)
“L1, eller: Tungans rätt i munnen” Provins (Fall 2019)