Yes, it is a lot to live with—

Being born an Aries sun with a Scorpio moon.

Lady Gaga, Henry James, and I have this in common.

(Go on and be a gay icon, the stars divined.)

A Scorpio novelist friend of mine said she’s never been interested in celebrities,

Whereas I’ve spent my whole life being a fan.

Even when I’m not a fan, I still rubberneck.

Celebrity is like that, I guess.

Star power. The “it” factor.

Rizz.

Some people are compelling.

Others are off-putting or boring, like a middle-aged man who turns away from you just as you’re being introduced.

Or a half-white girl who comes up to you at an event you’re headlining to ask, “So, who are you?”

줄 건 꼽밖에 없는 것들.

It is what it is.

I used to introduce myself as a “repentant” Aries.

Why would I want to be impatient, competitive, and reckless?

I know Aries can be a lot.

Like calling your Gemini gf during a drunken midnight bath (which is exactly what it sounds like) to tell her you love her.

A gazillion times in a single conversation.

“And here I am, the / center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!”

Wrote Frank O’Hara, an Aries raised as a Cancer—let me finish—because he was conceived before his parents’ marriage.

Anton Hur, the most April-y Aries I know, has translated something like twenty writers between Korean and English.

Including Bora Chung (Gemini), Ocean Vuong (Libra), and the seven members of BTS: Jin (Sagittarius), Suga (Pisces), J-Hope (Aquarius), RM (Virgo), Jimin (Libra), V (Capricorn), and Jungkook (Virgo).

Whereas I feel very March-y March with my Pisces stellium in Mercury, Mars, and Saturn.

Still, I have reservations about signing with a Pisces agent.

Apparently my Aries sun and Venus in the second house, i.e., Taurus, makes me materially lavish in love?

“Since reality was too prickly for my lavish personality . . . ”

I roll around in my mouth like hard candy the words of John Ashbery, a Leo sun with a Leo moon(!), translating Arthur Rimbaud, a Libra-Scorpio cusp.

Meanwhile “the flowering tree       blossoms with a burning heart       as if thinking of another flowering tree       burns its heart.”

That’s how Jack Jung, a Scorpio sun with a Gemini moon, translated Yi Sang, a Libra-Virgo cusp.

Yi Sang was once photographed with his friends Park Tae Won, a Sagittarius novelist (and grandfather of Virgo filmmaker Bong Joon-ho), and Kim So-Un, a Capricorn poet-translator.

Rebecky, a Libra crop top about town, has slept with every sign twice and thrice over. Except Cancers—at least not knowingly.

They say the list is otherwise pretty evenly distributed.

Jeffrey Zuckerman, a Libra, translated René Char, a Gemini poet and member of the French Resistance, in conversation with Albert Camus, a Scorpio writer and editor of a Resistance newspaper, from French to English for me to use as the epigraph for an essay translated from Korean to English.

“ . . . it left us transparent to ourselves and proffered us the milk of years to savor in warm bubbles when this milk very much was nourishing us . . . ”

Sandy Joosun Lee, another angelic Libra, translated Won-pyung Sohn, a Taurus, whose novel was recommended by Suga, the Pisces of BTS.

Dong Li—a Libra poet who translates between English, Chinese, French, and German—translates Forrest Gander, an Aquarius poet-translator.

I bumped into the latter at the gallery show and launch for a book on Joe Brainard, a Pisces artist, written by John Yau, a Gemini poet-critic.

Masked, we were chatting briefly about poetry and Seoul when I just couldn’t help myself.

“I’m so sorry, but you look so familiar. What’s your name?”

“I’m Forrest Gander,” he replied kindly.

That’s when I realized I recognized him from being, well, Forrest Gander the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry.

Two of the poets I’ve translated, Lee Hyemi and Lee Soho, are Aquarians born in 1988.

They couldn’t be more different.

Hyemi writes, “Look at the wet scales swimming toward the ripples of expulsion. Look at the broken fingers knocking on the door bolted shut. When I tenderly trample on the trembling gaze of another being to become their master, all my luminous fish cry out with tied feet. That’s the gift of fear. My beautiful low-lives who pledge allegiance only after opening their veins and checking for a surge.”

Fact: I took a comma out of my translation of “Femdom” published in 2020 by Tilted Axis Press, a UK publisher founded by Deborah Smith (Sagittarius) and currently led by Kristen Alfaro (Taurus).

Fact: My public reading of “Femdom” inspired a cross-country affair.

Fact: Another reading inspired a white-haired white woman to flash her photocard of Jimin, the Libra of BTS, at me and Hyemi after a reading.

Soho writes,

“IgaveyoumyeverythingbutnothingsatisfiesyouThisiswhyIdon’tlikedepressedgirlsHeystopwhiningandtalkstraight ThinkbeforeyouspeakHaveIbeendatingastupidgirl?NorightYou’resmartIcanhaveaconversationwithyouSodon’t actlikeyouknowsomethingIdon’tOppawillteachyoueverythingfromAtoZI’mdoingthisallforyouYoudon’tbelieveme?Takeajokewhydon’tyou”

Óscar Moisés Díaz, a Capricorn poet-astrologer-curator-filmmaker-goth, DM’d me about my translation of “Roosevelt Island” by Soho.

“I watched the video with Lee Soho awhile back and that poem she has about Roosevelt Island was so !!! speaking of film, i’ve been writing this poem about this aquarius who i went to go see midsommar twice with cuz he loved it n then weird mutual ghosting but our next date was suppose to be like biking n taking shrooms on Roosevelt Island i was like omg”

Did you know that Eartha Kitt (Aquarius) had a threesome with James Dean (Aquarius) and Paul Newman (Aquarius)?

Imagine: an Aquarian threesome.

Gertrude Stein, too, was an Aquarius.

Her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, was a Taurus who included a now-infamous hashish fudge recipe in her cookbook.

Bertolt Brecht, another macho Aquarius, was friends with Walter Benjamin, a Cancer.

Elsewhere they smoked and played chess outdoors.

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality,” Bertolt might’ve said, “but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Then Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931.

Audre Lorde on February 18, 1934.

What a day!

I’m only an Aquarius rising.

The two novelists I’ve translated are Choi Jin-young (Sagittarius) and Serang Chung (Virgo).

Scorpio playwright Kim Yeon Jae tells me over Zoom that all astrology lovers should read Olga Tokarczuk, a Jungian Aquarius.

I’ve also translated poets Heo Su-gyeong (Gemini) and Kim Eon Hee (unknown).

The former is my longtime favorite. So why did the latter’s rage flow so easily through me?

Three South Korean poets—Moon Bo Young (Aquarius), Liyoun Kim (Sagittarius), Sono Kim (triple Libra)—and I recently read Kindred together in both English and Korean.

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

Octavia Butler was a Cancer sun with a Capricorn moon.

“ . . . yes to lie back among strangely fashioned cushions and sip eastern wines and talk…Alex threw himself on the bed…removed his shoes…stretched and relaxed . . . yes and have music waft softly into the darkened and incensed room…he blew a cloud of smoke…oh the joy of being an artist and of blowing blue smoke through an ivory holder inlaid with red jade and green…”

Reading “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” by Richard Bruce Nugent, another Cancer, changed my life.

I even wrote an undergrad paper on how “over a thousand ellipses punctuate the text as a kind of rhetorical smoke pervading the text, mimicking the literal smoke that inspires Alex’s discursive thinking.” 😭

Seth Chandler is a Cancer translator married to a Capricorn academic with knuckle tats.

Seth also wrote his MA thesis on Capricorn poet Oh Kyu-won.

Poet-translator Anne Carson is a Cancer who lives in Canada.

“someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”

]

]if only we

could access Sappho’s

             birth chart!

]

]

                             ]

My closest friends in Seoul include Sanghoon (Taurus), Sohee (Sagittarius), and Hoyoung (Pisces).

Hoyoung, the most level-headed Pisces I know, translated Sung’s Aries-ass memoir into Korean and Hwang Inchan’s Taurean poems into English.

Sohee, my forever chronic pain buddy, may be the lowest energy Sag alive.

Whereas I associate Sagittariuses (Sagittari?) with Jamie Lee Curtis energy. You know the memes.

(JLC is a Scorpio sun, Aries moon, Sag rising—so obvious once you know.)

My Libra sun, Cancer moon, Sag rising, Kiwi-poet-friend Bronte brings this level of enthusiasm to our poetry workshops.

An absolute delight.

Tommy Pico is a Sagittarius poet-screenwriter who took vocal lessons to slay at readings and karaoke.

Teebs is why I perform like this.

Sanghoon is a Taurus multi-hyphenate who does drag as a white man named John Johnson.

I saw John Johnson debut in a basement club back in 2018!

And here I am now, acting as free as a white man myself!

In New York, my social life revolves around Geminis, with J at the center of all beauty.

A materialistic materialist, if you can believe it.

She’s also a filmmaker who, in college, made a list of Gemini filmmakers:

Agnès Varda, the Wachowski sisters, Rainer Werner Fassbinder . . .

Then she had the gall to name only Quentin Tarantino for Aries!

“There’s a failure in our walk, / I think to myself as I think about body and face and form and place, / the way my hands move when they type these words, / when they clap real loud, / when they squeeze yours real tight, / when they hold these books, / when they clutch that beer, / when they shake late at night after tossing and turning for hours on end / trying to dream those dreams you had when I was small, / when you were old and I saw them in your words / and heard your voice.”

Finally, I’ve been redeemed.

Sky Hopinka is an Aries!!!

Much like Frank (O’Hara, I mean—Frank Ocean is a Scorpio), Sky is an Aries who thought he was something else.

This Pisces-Aries cusp thought he was a Pisces until he downloaded an astrology app as an adult.

“So, I guess that made a lot of sense . . . I feel like I was pretty thoughtful and introverted, but at the same time, somewhat determined, I think.”

Eunice Lee, a poet-translator whose editorial suggestions I trust so much, is a Gemini-Cancer cusp who identifies more with the latter.

But the way she talks about G-Dragon, a Leo idol who famously dedicated a love song to a Virgo (“J,” born September 19), is highly suspect.

“In wanting / to understand the ropes and / ebonies I have been neither man, / nor woman. . . I / breathe by some unstable grace, by / alms almost: I don’t know how I / returned, don’t know how I’m still / trying to write a testament and can / only have pent-up dreams, whole / years I went without sleep, / dreaming of a space of my own, / which I found only in books / written by others.”

Jennifer Shyue, a Cancer, translates Julia Wong Kcomt, a Gemini tusán writer.

My best friend from college is a Gemini, too.

She’s been dating a Gemini twin for about a decade now.

Emily is the first Gemini I ever loved—knowingly, at least.

You know, Geminis get a bad rep because of Donald Trump and Ye.

Liars, cheats, and thieves.

Or a good time?

The duality of man.

Gemininity, I call it.

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Walt Whitman, classic Gemini.

Sung Ryu, another Gemini translator very dear to me, is a fraternal twin.

Whereas Jiaqi Kang is a Gemini sicko with an Aquarius buddy, Kwan Ann Tan.

(Twin or sicko, the two Geminitious genders.)

“아니, 나는 웃으며 대답해. 인간인 게 나아. 네 살을 핥고 싶은 충동에 나는 굴복해.”

In the name of friendship, I translated from English to Korean a series of Jiaqi’s poems spilled from a pub table workshop with me and Hyemi.

Bruna Dantas Lobato, a Gemini writer-translator, translates Caio Fernando Abreu, a prolific Virgo writer-translator.

Before being killed by AIDS, Caio also translated Sun Tzu (suspected Scorpio), Carson McCullers (Pisces), and Susan Sontag (Capricorn).

Gena Rowlands, a Gemini actor, married and collaborated with John Cassavetes, a Sagittarius actor-filmmaker, until his death. 

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, my Aries comrade-in-arms, is dating a tall Gemini and translating Yūko Tsushima, an Aries writer of autofiction.

I often find myself sitting next to Lisa at readings.

Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, the other Aries translator-activist, moved away for school but tells me that she, Anton, and Frank Wynne were born on the same day. A big day for international literature!

Beside us is Mayada Ibrahim, a Virgo dating a Virgo.

Mayada also translated Najlaa Eltom, a Libra poet-translator.

Beyoncé, the reigning Virgo of our time, croons, “We ain’t got time like we used to / But we still shine like we used to.”

Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z is a Sagittarius. Solange is a Cancer.

Sometimes Alex Zucker, a Virgo who married a Leo, takes the B43 to hang out with us.

Many of his “authors, friends, and former lovers” were born in the first two weeks of August, specifically on August 4 and 6, he told a table of literary translators savoring peppercorn brussel sprouts al fresco.

The two authors Alex has translated the most are Jáchym Topol, a Leo multi-hyphenate, and Petra Hůlová, a Cancer novelist.

Alex also translated Patrik Ouředník, a Taurus writer and French-to-Czech translator who was once a chess consultant.

“In 1997, when I began working for the Buckleys, I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: five foot ten, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old, clean-cut. I liked cater-waiting because I looked good in a tuxedo and couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel.”

Alexander Chee, another obvious Leo.

Spencer Lee-Lenfield, a Leo whom I first saw on Instagram playing piano in short shorts, is marrying another Leo.

Leo 4 Leo!

All their adorable selfies make sense now.

Victoria Caudle, a Virgo sun with leopard-print Leo rising, translates Dolki Min, a masked Leo.

I met Dolki at a holiday party, where attendees were invited to read aloud an excerpt from their favorite queer book.

Dolki read from his self-published novel.

I read from my translation-in-progress of To the Warm Horizon.

Lee Jong San, a Taurus in a half-black, half-pink bob wig, received the inaugural Rainbow Bookmark Literary Prize for her trans sci-fi novel Customer.

The next day, I went to Ccol and bought a copy of Customer and what was then called Wig.

I read Wig in one sitting and gifted my copy to Victoria, whom I’d met earlier that year. She seemed like the type to fuck with an alien cruising online for human flesh.

Victoria then wrote her MA thesis on translating gender nonconforming characters in Wig and Customer, and Words Without Borders published an excerpt of her essay on personal pronouns.

An NYC agent talked to Victoria and signed Dolki, then still unpublished in his own country.

Five years after I first met Dolki (and never saw him again IRL), Walking Practice was published in English by HarperVia and in Korean by EH Book.

James Baldwin, also a Leo.

Fucked Marlon Brando, an Aries.

According to Quincy Jones, a Pisces, “Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherfucker you ever met. He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin [Leo]. Richard Pryor [Sagittarius]. Marvin Gaye [Aries].”

Trinity by fire.

And speaking of Aries tea, Camille Paglia is an Aries.

“I—I am an Aries. I am a completely militant, Amazon, independent woman. I will not—I will not—I will not cater to men. I have not lived with a man. I have not catered to any man in my life. I punish men constantly day by day. If they— if they step over the line and demean women, I am AT them. I have—I have—”(Interviewer: How do you punish them?) “I have hit them over the head with umbrellas. I have kicked them. I have punched them.”

The words of a woman who feuded with Susan Sontag, a Capricorn.

Susan’s “Who is Camille Paglia?” is very Mariah’s “I don’t know her.”

Emily Yae Won is a Capricorn translator who asked her publisher to print her translation of Aries writer Samuel Beckett’s Murphy on the presumed birth date of Murphy, the titular Capricorn.

Emily co-translated Sagittarius writer Han Kang with Paige Aniyah Morris, a Taurus writer-translator who gives the best feedback on unwieldy pieces like this.

Emily also translated Homesick by Jennifer Croft, a Libra writer-translator who champions Olga the aforementioned Jungian Aquarius writer-activist; is married to Boris Dralyuk, a Cancer poet-translator; and gave birth to future genius Taurus twins.

Aaron Robertson, a verdant Capricorn, translates Igiaba Scego, a Pisces writer-activist.

Tiffany Tsao, a Pisces writer-translator, translates Norman Erikson Pasaribu, a Pisces writer-translator, from Indonesian to English.

Norman is also translating Tiffany’s Oddfits fantasy trilogy from English to Indonesian.

“I write what I see. I paint what I am.”

Of course Etel Adnan was a Pisces.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a Pisces, too.

The epigraph to Dictee reads: “May I write words more naked than flesh, / stronger than bone, more resilient than / sinew, sensitive than nerve.”

Theresa attributed these words to Sappho, but they were her own.

What would motivate such a stunt?

So she may write words.

So we may write words.

After all.

 

Sources:

“And here I am”: Frank O’Hara, “Autobiographia Literaria,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995)

“Since reality was too prickly”: Arthur Rimbaud, “Bottom,” in Illuminations,  tr. John Ashbery (New York: New Directions, 2012)

“The flowering tree”: Yi Sang, “Flowering Tree,” in Yi Sang: Selected Works, ed. Don Mee Choi, tr. Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, Sawako Nakayasu, and Joyelle McSweeney (Seattle: Wave Books, 2020)

“It left us transparent to ourselves”: from an excerpted text message from Jeffrey Zuckerman translating René Char’s Progeny of the Sun, quoted in “Poetry Practices Being Caught in the Act” by Lee Hyemi, translated by Soje, forthcoming from the Poetry Translation Centre

“Look at the wet scales”: Lee Hyemi, “Femdom,” in Unexpected Vanilla, tr. Soje (Tilted Axis Press, 2020)

“I gave you my everything”: Lee Soho, “Oppa Likes That Type of Girl,” in Catcalling, tr. Soje (Rochester, N.Y.: Open Letter Books, 2021)

“Art is not a mirror”: Source unknown. Translator unknown. Maybe a Trotsky quote.

“There is nothing new”: Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)

“yes to lie back”: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” in FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, 1926, www.scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/bruce-nugent-smoke-lilies-and-jade-1926 

“Someone will remember us”: Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Penguin Random House, 2002)

“There’s a failure in our walk”: Sky Hopinka, director, Sunflower Siege Engine (2022), www.skyhopinka.com/sunflower-siege-engine-2022 

“So, I guess”: Maori Karmael Holmes, “Sky Hopinka,” BlackStar, 1 June 2022, www.blackstarfest.org/manylumens/season-2/sky-hopinka

“In wanting”: Julia Kcomt Wong, “The Cow’s Shadow,” in Vice-royal-ties, tr. Jennifer Shyue (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021)

In the name of friendship: Jiaqi Kang, “Portrait of an Ape,” SmokeLong Quarterly, 20 Mar. 2023, www.smokelong.com/stories/portrait-of-an-ape

“In 1997”: Alexander Chee, “Mr. and Mrs. B,” in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (New York: Mariner Books, 2021)

According to Quincy Jones: David Marchese, “Quincy Jones on the Secret Michael Jackson and the Problem with Modern Pop,” Vulture, 7 Feb. 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html

“I-I am an Aries”: “Celebs Prove Astrology is Real: Camille Paglia (Aries Sun).” YouTube, uploaded by Astrapichor, 16 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEjja3bF9c0

“I write what I see”: Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais (Brooklyn: Post-Apollo Press, 1986; second ed. Brooklyn: Litmus Press, 2021)

The epigraph to Dictee: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982).