Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies, 6. Berkeley: Global, Area and International Archive, University of California Press, 2013. xxx, 222 pp. US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-938169-06-9.
Scholars of literature who are conducting research in a transnational context often find themselves working with a vocabulary that declines toward essentialism. It is difficult to discuss a text without situating it within a (putatively self-evident) national literature, itself founded upon a circular logic in which the nation, often an imagined ethno-nation of implied common biological descent, both explains and is explained by the text. This is not surprising; during the modern period many of the authors and readers in question would have embraced such a paradigm. Similarly, many scholars who have taken on the interplay of texts that traverse these categories have merely reproduced them with little concern for their historicity or instability. By contrast, Serk-Bae Suh’s study on the role of translation in the colonial context avoids the reification of national categories without losing sight of the tremendous influence those categories exerted and continue to exert, as he examines asymmetrical power relations involved in specific instances of translation.
The first of these is the work of Hosoi Hajime (細井肇, 1886–1934), a writer, editor, and translator who considered it his life’s mission to “bring Japan and Korea together into genuine unity” (18) under Japanese imperial rule. Suh argues that Hosoi’s project, which advocated the unification of knowledge and empathy (in Hosoi’s terminology, “love” [愛]) was doomed from the beginning, as it never confronted the political conflict (stemming from the violence of colonization) which necessitated that unification (44–45).
Next is the 1938 Japanese translation (by Chang Hyŏkchu장혁주 [張赫宙], 1905–1997) of a traditional opera Ch’unhyangjŏn (춘향전 [春香傳], The Tale of Spring Fragrance), staged in both Japan and Korea. The translation met with resistance by intellectuals, such as Yi T’aejun (이태준 [李泰俊], 1904–1970?), who were concerned with both “misrepresentation of Korean culture and customs” and ultimately “the total assimilation of Korean culture into Japanese” (59). Suh, however, points out that rather than a form of resistance against Japanese imperialism, the cultural nationalist response of these critics, premised as it was on a symmetrical relationship between two putatively autonomous cultures, only “served to compensate for the political asymmetry between the colonized and the colonizer” (66).
In chapter 3, Suh takes up the career of Ch’oe Chaesŏ (최재서 [崔載瑞], 1908-1964), a scholar turned journalist who became an editor of the Japanese-language journal Kokumin bungaku (国民文学, 1941–1945), published in Korea. According to Suh, Ch’oe represented a different approach to culture in the colonial context: he wished to position “Korean literature and culture within the literature and culture of Japan” (84). As Suh describes, this schema was Ch’oe’s attempt to preserve the autonomy of culture without resisting the politics of his day; as a result his attempts were anything but autonomous, and in fact “colluded with the politics of colonial domination” (103).
Moving into the period following liberation, Suh discusses the historian Tōma Seita (藤間生大, 1913–) and the poet/translator Kim Soun (김º“운[金素雲], 1907–81). In 1956, two years after a series of his translations of literary works into Japanese had been republished with commentary by Tōma, Kim published an article that attacked the historian’s “ostensibly sympathetic” (104) readings. Kim attacked Tōma for readings that he thought were plagued by “wild speculation and dogma” made worse by being “shrouded in good will” (104). Kim’s criticism focused on questioning why “colonial experience should be the ultimate hermeneutical horizon” (126); for Suh, however, the greater problem lay in equating Japanese under the U.S. Occupation with past forms of imperialism, which allowed them to “escape accountability for Japan’s own colonial expansion” (113).
Finally, Suh discusses the poet Kim Suyŏng (김수영[金洙暎], 1921–1968) as a representative of a generation of bilingual intellectuals in postcolonial Korea who were forced to negotiate the politics and pragmatics of their differential language abilities amid a “nationalist imperative […] to favor Korean as the sole national language” (145). As Suh points out, however, such a project “indicated aspirations to a unified Korea that was not only absent in the present but had also never existed in the past” (148). As such, these intellectuals posed a challenge to an ideology that “erases the alterity of language and reinforces monolingualism as the normative linguistic situation” (157).
Suh’s study is a concrete example of the difficulty in historicizing essentialized peoplehood constructs while preserving collective accountability in the face of a history of colonial violence. In focusing on “translation in the colonial context” (xiii), he scrupulously maintains the contingency and complexity of the subject positions of the individuals involved. The result, to this reader, was a historically specific critical theorization that could nonetheless contribute to understanding translation outside of this colonial context, where other forms of alterity and asymmetry would inevitably be operative. The only moment of hesitation I felt was near the end of the book, in his reflections on representation, when he concedes the existence of communities formed upon “epistemological substrata” comprised of shared conventions and norms (130). It soon becomes clear that Suh has conceded this only to then undermine it, first noting that no such community will lack its own internal alterity or be entirely homogeneous (131), and then clarifying that colonial alterity “need not involve any essentialist identification” (134). My fear, though, is that the initial concession implies the existence of a privileged form of alterity between ahistorical “peoples,” qualitatively different from that between other collectivities or between individuals, which could be read to justify a belief in essentialist notions of ethno-nations by a reader inclined to do so. Suh cannot, of course, be held accountable for all possible (mis-)interpretations of his text; I raise this point only to say that addressing this issue more directly would have made a strong study even stronger.
Edward Mack
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
pp. 718-720