Southeast Asia Spotlight - February 27, 2026 - Interview with Mui Poopoksakul, AB '01
Mui Poopoksakul’s “Harvard Intro” is delightfully multi-hyphenate. She was a Literature concentrator (Class of 2001), lived in Dunster House, and now juggles two jobs with remarkable skill: “I was a lawyer full time, and then I went to literary translation full time, and now I'm actually doing both.” (She was briefly a journalist, too, before law school.) She describes herself as “the last generation pre-Facebook at Harvard”, at a time where the Internet was accessed primarily by Ethernet cable. She was a coxswain for the men’s lightweight crew team – “it was a lot of fun” – and met her best friends while living in Weld during her freshman year.
But when Mui returned to Harvard to speak at the Asia and Asians at Harvard conference last November, she reminded her audience that she began college in the fall of 1997 – right in the middle of the Asian Financial Crisis, which affected exchange rates between the Thai baht and the dollar. “It was very frightening,” she adds, explaining that this experience initially steered her towards concentrating in economics. However, on the advice of her father, she chose to follow her passion for French and Latin, culminating in a degree in Literature and an honours thesis reading French poet Francis Ponge through deconstruction theory.
“It’s okay to study what you want,” she tells me. “I really loved my department. It was really small. I think we were like 12 people in my year in literature.” Why literature? “I wanted to observe the art, somebody else’s ability to give life to an experience through words that really sharpens your own experience of the world. That really moved me – observing how words can really bring things into focus beyond just imparting information.”
Mui doesn’t just have multiple careers – she is fluent in multiple languages. She lives in Berlin and can speak some German, and wrote a thesis on French literature. She is known, however, for her outstanding translations of Thai works into English. In our conversation, she describes the Thai language – and the gargantuan task of translating from it – with infectiously bright colour.
“Thai is a maximalist language,” she says at one point, describing the synonyms and rhyming cadences she often grapples with. At another, she tells me that there are so many different ways of saying ‘you’ or ‘I’ in Thai that she can’t even count them. And even more interesting is its grammatical bareness: “You can sort of think of Thai as being punctuation free, and so if you're used to forming your thoughts in English, it can be hard to chunk your thoughts.”
We chat, too, about the different Englishes of the world – which Mui identifies as a live discussion ongoing in literary translation circles. “I think it's very important for the English language to open up and for different kinds of Englishes to be accepted within the world of literary translation.”
What does Mui look for when she reads, whether in Thai, English, or any other language? “There are certain images that appear to me that really give [the work] a sense of place.” The elusive ‘sense of place’ is almost synaesthetic: “When I read books from Southeast Asia, I almost feel this humidity about the writing when it’s done well. I can feel the heaviness of the air, almost…I love that.”
What are the images Mui carries of the places that she loves? For Cambridge, she thinks of the KiOSK – formerly known as the Out of Town Newsstand until its reopening to the public last May. “I used to buy magazines all the time as a teenager – it’s a real landmark to me.” Berlin, where she now lives and is calling in from, is wintry grey but still lovely. And Bangkok is an array of tropical fruits – a “bunch of produce”, studded with longkong and mangosteens.
Mui did not have the chance to study Southeast Asia while at Harvard, though she recalls searching the printed class catalogue with a highlighter in hand. She would have wanted to take a class on Southeast Asian literature – “we don’t read enough of each other” – and history. If she could teach any course about Southeast Asia, she would teach a small workshop on literary translation for students hoping to translate from Southeast Asian languages. “I think [translators’] tricks can be shared better across the region if you’re workshopping together.”
Take kaya, the Singaporean and Malaysian name for the coconut custard spread common in Southeast Asia. In Thai it appears under a different name, yet in English, “kaya” has gradually taken hold as the borrowed term of choice. Calling it “coconut jam”, Mui laughs, feels sterile and even misleading – conjuring a spread that is firm and jelly-like, not soft and creamy. But even that choice raises further questions: is kaya Singaporean English or Malaysian English? If a Thai text references it, is it legitimate to translate it as kaya? Should it be italicised? These are the kinds of questions she would enjoy debating with students interested in Southeast Asia.
Glossing, as Mui points out, is a delicate act that relies on a keen awareness of audience. Who is she translating for? “I’m not writing toward any particular region. But I am more and more aware of the fact that my work is doing what I want it to do, which is to allow us to read each other.”
Which of Mui’s translations should readers attempt first? She tells me she is happy to recommend her first collection, The Sad Part Was, which she noted for its extensive wordplay. Mui is also “really, really proud” of Bright, which is now being taught in some schools in New England. “That just makes me so happy. When I was a student there in the 90s, being taught a Thai book would have been unimaginable. So it’s amazing to have that happen now.”
Interview by Shayna Leng, Harvard College '27