Translation was the primary means for the powerless to understand those in power.
The powerless have no choice but to learn about those in power, yet those with power are uninterested in learning the language of the powerless. Western colonizers, apart from practical needs, did not bother learning or uplifting the language of the colonized, whom they saw as inferior. When Colonel William Farquhar, Singapore’s first administrator, learned Malay and picked up Malay customs (also fathering six children with a half-Malay mistress in the process), it was seen as a weakness, not a political strength, and he was targeted by Singapore’s official founder Sir Stamford Raffles for “going native.” South Korea, a Japanese colony for almost half a century, has entire bookstores dedicated to books translated from Japanese, with many from the pre-war generation still able to speak the language. Haruki Murakami is particularly popular; it is estimated that at least three times as many Murakami novels are available in Korean compared to English. But until recently, Japanese readers had little interest in Korean literature. During the East Asia Literature Forum in Seoul last October, a gathering of the region’s most well-known writers, Japanese novelist Keiichiro Hirano, expressed that “it is very difficult for me to think of any Japanese writer of the same generation as remarkable as Kim Yeonsu and Eun Heekyung,” and yet very few Japanese writers, let alone readers, have even read their work. Korean culture, thanks to its colony status, was considered inferior to Japanese culture for years, particularly amongst the older generation. Japan’s zainichi or ethnic Korean community have been discriminated against for decades, many stripped of citizenship, as documented in Japanese novels and films like Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go and Yang Seok-il’s Chi to Hone (“Blood and Bones”), made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Takeshi Kitano. At the same forum, Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima, the child of French literature professors, spoke about only discovering Korean literature in her 40s when she met Korean writers at the University of Iowa. When she discovered the poetry of Yi Sang and Yoon Dongju, both poets who lived in Japan-occupied Korea, and learning they had died of police violence in Japan, she was shocked into silence. And yet the currents between Japan and South Korea are shifting, with wave after wave of Korean popular culture (hallyu) washing up on Japanese shores. Korean literature made its biggest splash in Japan yet in 2018, with Cho Nam Joo’s Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, released at the end of the year, selling over 130,000 copies and topping bestseller charts. Bungei, one of Japan’s leading literary magazines, published a special issue titled Korea, Feminism, Japan in July this year, featuring leading Japanese and Korean women writers. It was an unexpected hit, with the magazine running emergency reprints for only the second time in 86 years, selling over 14,000 copies within a few weeks, and a fourth reprint out in September. “The oyajis (older men) are the only ones blind to the popularity of hallyu,” writes cultural critic Minako Saito, also the older sister of Mariko Saito, translator of Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. “It is the Oyajis,” she writes, “in politics and the media who are stirring anti-Korean sentiment.” Japanese women and the young, she says, share the opposite sentiment. Underlying her words is a scathing critique: the arrival and spread of Korean culture in Japan is an affront to Japanese men, upending belief in their own cultural superiority.
Translation is an act of selection, a personal choice as well as a subjective judgment.
And yet, curiously enough, even as Han Kang has garnered international acclaim, emerging as a representative of Korean literature in the West, back home she remains on the periphery of her home country’s literary scene—just like Haruki Murakami with Japanese literature in the earlier stages of his career. Translators play an enormous, outsized role in interpreting foreign cultures for their home audience. Translation is an act of selection, a personal choice as well as a subjective judgment that something is more worthy of becoming known by one’s home audience than everyone else. To borrow Teju Cole’s metaphor again, how does the ferry operator choose which passenger to ferry across the ocean? The choice we as translators make has far greater impact than we may realize. At the East Asian Literature Forum last year, I heard one after another beautiful story from writers that almost no one in America would have recognized. Even as a scholar of East Asian languages myself, I was startled by how few writers I had heard of, and how much of what I read in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean was to a large extent pre-defined by what had already been picked up and translated by the West. Reading takes time, and reading beyond the canon takes effort. If I, as a scholar of East Asian languages, found that difficult, what sort of scholar am I? What more of publishers and readers in America and the West, who have scant knowledge of writers from East Asia beyond the few names that have won awards in their home countries? These stories had to be heard by a wider international audience. I reached out to one of the Japanese writers I had met at the forum—and received her permission to translate a story she had read out, a powerful story on womanhood that had many in the audience crying. Despite winning multiple domestic awards, she has never been published in English. If we never hear from these writers, how blinkered and piecemeal is our understanding of the world outside the dominant American cultural current? As readers and translators, it takes effort to recognize our blinkers and even more effort to look beyond them. We may not be strong enough to shift oceans—but maybe, just maybe, our collective effort will make it easier to swim against the tide.About the Author
Wei Ting is a Singaporean writer and translator. Her writing has been published in Time Magazine, The Economist, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Follow her on Twitter @intewig and jenweiting.com.
Source: https://electricliterature.com/how-literary-translation-can-shift-the-tides-of-power/