Incongruent Reflections

Abstract

This chapter investigates the discursive strategy of translation employed in bilingual writing in colonial Korea. As modern nation states set in motion the nationalization of language, a space of discourse emerges with language as an official medium that conditions textual production and modalities of existence. In colonial Korea, once the Korean language was standardized, the newly imposed Japanese national language forced a linguistic dilemma onto Korean writers: translate or convert to Japanese writing. The term “space of bilingual writing” [ijungŏ kŭlssŭgi konggan] (Oct. 1, 1942–Aug.15, 1945), thus, usually refers to Japanese writings by Koreans in Korean literary history due to the effect of coercion of colonial discourse on the national language. Rethinking translation as a form of discursive resistance outside this limited space, this chapter analyzes the question of translation that arose specifically over the controversy of Chang Hyŏkchu’s Japanese adaptation of the popular Korean classic Ch’unhyang chŏn in 1938, and it aims to restore different possibilities for non-national writings through Kim Saryang’s theory and practice of translation as bilingual writing. Against ethnocentric translation and linguistic nationalism in both Korea and Japan, Kim Saryang employs translation as an act of creative decentering. A close look at Kim’s writings will show how relations between different modes of the linguistic medium address different modalities of existence that deviate from the standard or national language and decenter the space of colonial discourse to open up new spatial possibilities.