This Beauty Born of Parting: Literary Translation between Korean and English via the Korean Diaspora, 1920–Present
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Figlerowicz, Marta
Abstract
This Beauty Born of Parting: Literary Translation between Korean and English via the Korean Diaspora, 1920–Present shows how translation has been and continues to be a generative process for both modern Korean and Korean American literature, highlighting and analyzing moments in the history of each when translation from one side generated innovative work on the other. Such translations have served as a matrix in which writers have given literary form to their displacement in time, culture, and space during the rapid cultural and political upheavals of Korea’s compressed modernity. This research takes as its methodological underpinning the premise that literary translation is susceptible to interpretation as an act of literary and historical reception, and therefore understanding the shifts in the horizon of expectation between source text and translation reveals the aesthetic form imparted to historical displacement by the translator’s hand. Over the course of four case studies, this thesis traces a long arc during which its Korean and Korean-diasporic writer-translators have moved away from an anxiety over a sense of stylistic belatedness to the development of Korean literature toward a proud sense of post-national, post-ethnic identity anchored in a past and present of shared grief. The dissertation begins with the poetry of the monk Manhae Han Yong-un, whose 1926 collection Nim-ǔi ch’immuk offered one of the first sustained visions of for a distinctively modern vernacular Korean verse style, and the repeated attempts from 1929 to 1970 of the seminal Korean American novelist Younghill Kang to communicate the full stylistic shock of Han’s poetry to Anglophone audiences in a sequence of wildly differing styles. In the next chapter, the immigrant writer Richard E. Kim’s efforts to tell a “universal” story of religious doubt against the backdrop of the Korean War through the prestige language of existentialism in his popular 1964 novel The Martyred gave occasion to director Yu Hyǒn-mok’s efforts to make an international reputation for Korean film’s technical mastery of the avant-garde cinematic techniques pioneered by the European postwar religious films of Bergman and Bresson. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s adaptation and translation in her 1982 work Dictee’s “Calliope” chapter of her mother Cha Hyung Soon’s memories of her young adulthood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria expressed a sense of helplessness over Korean history’s cyclical political violence. The study concludes by juxtaposing two works in translation, Kim Hyesoon’s 2016 Autobiography of Death in Don Mee Choi’s 2018 English rendering and Emily Jungmin Yoon’s 2018 A Cruelty Special to Our Species in Han Yujoo’s 2020 Korean version, which together attest to an emerging vision of Korean cultural identity bound not by language, nation, or ethnicity, but instead realized almost simultaneously across languages through a woman-led community of grief over a shared past as the basis for future-oriented literary innovation.
Recommended Citation
Lee-Lenfield, Spencer, "This Beauty Born of Parting: Literary Translation between Korean and English via the Korean Diaspora, 1920–Present" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1340.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1340
