In this piece published in AGNI, I draw upon my experiences as a trans translator and reader to articulate why refusing to transcend difference is fundamental to the art of translation. Starting with a critique of a translator’s note in the Korean edition of Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, I offer examples of the strategies I employed while translating Saekja, an iconic Korean trans performer’s voice into English, and adding translator’s notes to the Korean translation of The Terrible We by Cameron Awkward-Rich. My approach also finds parallels to the use of non-colloquial language in the Korean edition of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, translated by e. yaewon. In conversation with Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity and Palestinian poet Fadqa Tuqan’s “freedom in ambiguity,” these examples allow readers to think about questions of access to queer stories, how one might recreate marginalized voices in another language, and why translators must honor opacity as artists in their own right.
This essay was first written in Korean and published in Webzine View in September 2025.