Spencer Lee-Lenfield is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: You attended Harvard as an undergrad, where you concentrated in Hist & Lit. Now, you’ve returned as a professor of Comparative Literature. What initially drew you to Harvard, and what brought you back?
SLL: I grew up in a very small town in the Midwest, in Michigan. The name of the town is Paw Paw. It’s a town of about 3,000 people, and I actually applied to a very small number of colleges, partly because I grew up in a place that didn’t have pressure cooker high schools and college counseling was very different for us. I thought, kind of on a lark, why don’t I apply to Harvard and Yale too, and see what happens?
When I got in, that was very shortly after Harvard had undergone its first massive expansion of financial aid.
I’m a first-generation college student, and my parents were thrilled, but also a little bit worried. And then when we realized how much financial aid was, even at that point in time — the financial aid program has expanded since — the total tuition that we ended up paying was actually significantly less than it would have been to go to even a small community college in the area where I grew up. So I will always be very grateful for the phenomenal financial aid here.
It wasn’t necessarily what drew me back so much as probably everyone in academia dreams of when they’re doing a Ph.D. — getting hired for a job at a place that generates as much fascinating research as Harvard, that has students who are as generally excited about learning and bring lots of energy and curiosity to the classroom on a regular basis.
And when you actually get offered your dream job, how could you possibly say no?
FM: Going back to your student days, what was the most memorable class that you took at Harvard?
SLL: I was a student in Humanities 10 in maybe the second or third year that it was offered.
At that point, Louis Menand and Stephen Greenblatt were teaching, just the two of them, so there were only three sections total.
We finished off our last section and we got a cake, which we iced with a quotation from Ulysses, and walked Stephen Greenblatt to the garden behind Lamont Library and had class outdoors. It was really magical.
The other class that had a huge impact on me, and I remember very fondly — Helen Vendler in the English department, who recently passed away, year before last, taught a seminar on Keats that I took as a junior, and it was technically a grad seminar, but there were still some seats left, and she said that any seats that were left could go to undergrads. Taking this class was like learning how to read all over again.
We would move through these Keats poems almost one word at a time. It completely changed the way that I thought about language and reading and poetry. It also spurred me to memorize all of the Keats odes that year. Those poems have stayed in my memory ever since.
FM: Do you have a favorite language?
SLL: I think I probably do at this point, and it’s the language that I’ve ended up working with the most: Korean. It’s the language that I have the deepest personal connection with, because although I’m Korean American, my path to knowing and using Korean everyday wasn’t at all straightforward.
I was adopted at a very early age. As an infant, I grew up in a household with two white parents, and I actually didn’t start learning Korean seriously until after college, when I was 25 and I really threw myself into learning it as passionately as I could.
It’s the language that my wife and I speak at home almost every day, and it’s the language that I’m now able to communicate with my birth family in as well.
I’m not sure that I’ll ever have quite as intense a relationship with any other language.
FM: What, if anything, is lost in translation?
SLL: A lot of people think that something always necessarily goes missing in translation or gets lost, as you put it. This is an abbreviated version of a Robert Frost observation: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” And a lot of people who are practicing translators actually kind of chafe at this.
I think that translation involves things getting lost in the same way that looking at something through a telescope involves certain things getting lost. Because translators are a kind of interpreter, the translation necessarily focuses on some aspect of the thing that they’re translating more than others.
You can’t capture it all at once, but when you read it, you are able to see what that particular person is focusing on in the same way as when you look through a telescope, you’re looking through a very narrow tube, and you’re cutting out some of your field of vision so that you can see this other thing in this narrower field of focus, even more precisely.
FM: What texts have most shaped your view of what literature can or should do?
SLL: My favorite novel, after all of these years, is originally “Mrs. Dalloway.” I read it for the first time when I was 14. I wrote my college admissions essay to Harvard about “Mrs. Dalloway.” One of the most exciting things that happened to me recently is that this is the 100th anniversary of “Mrs. Dalloway” this year, and I get to have a first research article about “Mrs. Dalloway” published in time for that anniversary. So I’m very excited about that.
I did Classics for several years, after technically starting with ancient Greek when I was an undergrad at Harvard, and then continued as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the three years after that. I think that left a really deep impression on me in terms of how to read things from the ancient past and what you might find in them and why they’re interesting, and some of the things that made the biggest impression on me from that point in time were Sappho, Greek drama — loved Sophocles, loved Euripides, loved Latin poetry. A lot of Ovid, a lot of Horace, a lot of Virgil.
Out of East Asian literature, I absolutely love the poetry of Han Yong-un, the Buddhist poet.
People are constantly doing ever more exciting things with Korean as a language. I’m a huge fan of the novelist Park Sang Young, whose work I enjoy tremendously. I love his translator, Anton Hur, who did an event with us here. And I also really admire the writing of Han Kang, who, of course, recently won the Nobel Prize. There’s a student of hers named Yun Haeseo, whose work I really admire a lot.
When I was a kid, I read the books of Linda Sue Park.
She won the Newbery Medal at one point in time, and those books, in terms of thinking about Korean heritage and Korean culture, were so illuminating and important for me, and even though I couldn’t see it then, they really planted a seed of knowledge about the basics of Korean history that was very important later in my adult life, many years later.
FM: While your current focus is Korean and Asian American literature, you have scholarly training in ancient Greek, Latin, English and French. How has this background influenced the way you approach writing in other traditions?
SLL: Being at universities in the United States or most of Europe, there is a tendency to place at the center of literary studies as the normal model literature, literature from the European tradition.
It’s always illuminating to read the literature of someplace that is traditionally the center as though it is the literature of the periphery, and vice versa.
I think that in comparative literature departments, that’s part of what we’re constantly trying to do, thinking across multiple traditions.
Trading off your frames of thinking always helps open up new research questions and new critical perspectives on literature and the arts more broadly.
FM: As a junior at Harvard, you started studying ancient Greek “for fun.” What else do you like to do for fun?
SLL: I play the piano a lot. I really like cooking and baking. We make a lot of Italian food and Korean food at home.
When I have time, I like a lot of art hobbies. I like drawing. I like calligraphy, both Western and Eastern. I’m constantly trying to learn to sew a little bit better.
But the other side of this is, like a lot of other professors, I actually really love what I do, and so when I’m not reading or writing or translating for work, a lot of what I find fun and exciting to do in my free time is actually reading books for fun that I can’t justify for work, or writing something for fun that’s not a work thing, or translating stuff for fun.
That’s part of the joy of getting to have a job that I really, really like.
FM: How many languages do you know?
SLL: The nuanced answer that I would give about this is that those of us who are in our field, Comparative Literature, and work with a bunch of languages realize that there is no single thing as knowing a language. You know different languages to different degrees for different purposes.
I would say that my working research languages — by which I mean that I’ve done peer-reviewed research work in them and plan to continue to do so — are French, Latin, Greek, Literary Sinitic or classical Chinese, and, of course, Korean.
Then the languages that I read, did oral exam-related things in, but honestly couldn’t sit and have a long conversation with you in are German, Italian, and Mandarin.
And then I have also, over the past few years, taken some Japanese and Vietnamese for fun and for research and for travel, though I can’t say that I know them really, really well.
Also Middle Korean. I know a decent amount, but always wish that I were better at it.
FM: When you’re translating texts, what are the main features you hope to preserve in your translation?
SLL: I would reframe that question slightly by saying that it depends who you are translating for and with what purpose or artistic vision you have in mind.
One of the lessons that you come to through reading a lot of translation theory and translation criticism — or at least that I personally believe — is that there’s not any such thing as one right way to translate.
All that said, when I am translating something for a general reader to enjoy and discover something new about a different language or culture, I always want them to come away excited by how intelligent, passionate, and thoughtful other people are, by the sounds and forms that are possible in other languages and other cultures, and I want them to come away at least a little bit thinking that they too would like to learn the language that that text was written in — not because the translation is missing something, but because they like the translation so much that they feel invited into the world of that language.
FM: What is one project you’re working on right now, scholarly or otherwise?
SLL: The really big thing is that at this life stage in the academic career cycle as someone who is very recently out of grad school like me is turning their dissertation into a research book, and so that’s what I’m in the middle of doing right now.
FM: If you weren’t doing what you do now, what might you be doing?
SLL: I think that a lot of us who are professors have envy of other people’s fields in the university, for various reasons. We’re constantly looking around at our colleagues in other fields and saying, “Oh, what you do is so cool.”
I really admire the work of a lot of people who are in the psychology department here. I took a little bit of very introductory psychology when I was here as a student. Dan Gilbert was teaching the intro psych class then, as he is now, and it was one of the hardest classes that I took, but I learned so much, and I absolutely loved it. And there’s still a part of me that wishes that I could be a research psychologist.
There’s a part of me that would love to be an astrophysicist. I love math. I love space. I don’t think that I had the talent at math to be a really good astrophysicist, but I find it really inspiring what those people do, and I love reading about their research.
I think that the other thing that I would have loved to do is — I would have loved to have been a novelist. I don’t think I will be now at this point in life, but I would have loved to.
FM: As a student, what were your favorite spots to frequent in the Square?
SLL: I was in Eliot as an undergrad, and so for a late night snack, it was always tempting to just take a very quick walk and go to Noch’s. I would get a slice of Sicilian and an Orangina.
Flour at that point was relatively new. There was not yet one in Harvard Square, so you had to walk toward the MIT one. That was something that we really liked doing, especially junior, senior year, and now you can go in Harvard Square.
To be honest, I always really liked dining hall food.
I spent a lot of time hanging out in Eliot dining hall. It’s still geographically in a really good place to just see people, so that was also a favorite hangout place.
FM: Favorite HUDS meal?
SLL: I really liked the gnocchi. I really liked the jiaozi, the gyoza, pot stickers — whatever you want to call them. I guess that means that I just like dumplings.
FM: You mentioned you were working on a book based on your dissertation. Looking ahead, what ideas do you hope that your book will push into public conversation?
SLL: I hope that the book helps speed along a conversation that lots of other smart people have already started about how Asian American literatures and literatures from across Asia can speak to each other and have interesting things to say to each other. Put another way, diasporic literatures, literatures of their home country, don’t necessarily need to be different conversations. They can be — each can stand on their own — but there are also a lot of interesting, rich observations that you get when you put the two together in a reverse way.
One of the theses of the book is that translation doesn’t just involve loss. Translation can also be a metaphor for processing the experience of loss, because translation provides a way of thinking about what it’s like to lose, or try to hold on to some things but let go of other things, or give something a new life, or make new gains while transforming something into a different shape. Those are all very similar to the life experiences of many people who migrate or are in a diasporic community, or are the second or third generation growing up someplace. And I think that many of those people have felt called to do work in translation, partly because it is a way, both consciously and unconsciously, of finding verbal expression for that.
FM: Any words of advice you would give your past self?
SLL: Universities are special places compared with workplaces, because there are so many different kinds of people around, and getting to have conversations with such a varied group of people in terms of experiences, backgrounds, talents, and personalities is a huge gift that you don’t get in the vast majority of places that you could work after college.
So talk with a lot of people. Ask them some of the simplest questions about themselves and listen very earnestly and with appreciation, kindness, and openness to the answers.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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