Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong

Rather than waxing poetic about polyglot minds and liminal or marginal identities, however, Hong dives into the crisscross of languages, disassembles them, and subjects them to new forms and new permutations. Her poetry wrestles with the fabric of language itself, chipping away at our linguistic norms and reflexes, exposing the rawness of the tongue beneath, connecting geographical topography and grammatical codes. Hong’s writing resonates with the friction between Korean and English in her own consciousness. The poet is no stranger to these issues herself. In her debut collection, Translating Mo’um, Hong interrogates the way fluency, linguistic hybridity, and translation are produced in her depiction of futuristic worlds through dislocated idioms. Each character uses their intimate knowledge of the language-their fluency-in their own singular way. The Historian writes in our English, with familiar grammar, vocabulary, and spelling, and transcribes (and sometimes translates) phonetically the variant of the Desert language spoken by the Guide, who converses with tourists, migrants, and other civilians every day.

In Cathy Park Hong’s second poetry collection, Dance Dance Revolution, the character of the Historian describes the complex and ever-shifting layers that make up the language of the Desert, a town that harkens back to Las Vegas in a world that feels post-apocalyptic. Rather, it is a property of the acquired language, and it can be lost or taken away. Most importantly, perhaps, fluency is primarily in play when two or more languages are involved, as few people would ever think to claim they are fluent in their mother tongue.

Fluency, in order to be fluency, must be recognized. They must also assess you as fluent-a process complicated by racial, ethnic, and national issues. Not only must you understand the language, but others must also understand your speech. There’s a social and political aspect to it.

But it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly produces fluency.

It shares with water both its etymology and its characteristics: fluent speech flows freely, with few, if any, hesitations or gaps. Still, dialects differ greatly depending on region.įluency is a tricky and precarious state. In the Desert, civilian accents morph so quickly that their accents betray who they talked to that day rather than their cultural roots. The language, while borrowing the inner structures of English grammar, also borrows from existing and extinct English dialects and other languages. The language spoken in the Desert is an amalgamation of some 300 languages and dialects imported into this country, a rapidly evolving lingua franca.

Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong