TRANSLATOR AS ACTIVIST: THE GENDERED ROLE OF RETRANSLATION IN KIM TONG-IN’S “SWEET POTATO”

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Notes

1. For discussion of retranslation’s historical “lesser” status, see Massardier-Kenney, “Toward a Rethinking of Retranslation.” For one of the few examples of retranslation scholarship dealing with gender and queer studies, see von Flotow, “Translating Women.”

2. Kim’s name is also romanized as Kim Dong-in and Kim Tongin; I will use McCune-Reischauer romanization throughout this article for consistency.

3. For more on gender and translation in, for example, Canada and Western Europe, see von Flotow, “Feminism in Translation”; von Flotow, “Feminist Translation”; Santaemilia, Gender, Sex, and Translation.

4. Wallace, “Writing the Wrongs of Literature,” 67.

5. Young-min Kwon, introduction to Sweet Potato by Kim Tong-in, translated by Grace Jung, xi.

6. Lee, “Kim Tongin Munhak e Natanan Pokchapsŏng ŭi Insik Yŏngu,” 476.

7. “Realism” and “naturalism” are sometimes used interchangeably (and Kim Tong-in has been referred to as a pioneer of both genres, having been influenced by European and Japanese naturalist and realist works). However, realism tends to portray the lives of middle-class characters. Naturalism has a greater focus on the despair of the lower class and deals with more taboo topics than realism. For more on the beginnings of naturalism in colonial Korea, see Shin, “Recasting Colonial Space.”

8. Readers will note Jung’s translation is the first to render “Kamja” as “Sweet Potato” rather than “Potato” or “Potatoes.” Although kamja typically means “potato,” in some dialects, it instead means “sweet potato.” For more on the variant meanings of kamja, see Fukui, “On the History of Words.”

9. Its publisher, Honford Star, releases contemporary translations of modern classics from East Asia.

10. The most well-known examples of translated Korean literature’s increasing popularity include the novels of Bae Suah and Han Kang, whose book The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.

11. These gendered metaphors are, in some instances, reversed. George Steiner treats the translator as a masculine figure who “invades, extracts, and brings home” what he desires from the source text. Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion,” 157.

12. Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” 461.

13. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 273.

14. Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” 455.

15. Ibid., 461.

16. Sohn notes four main junctures in which translations of “Kamja” diverge along the gradation between literal and free, or more and less “faithful,” translations. The first three include sentence structure, translations of Korean cultural terms, and references to Korean titles and names. The fourth is rendering of the sentence subject, which is often omitted or ambiguous in Korean.

17. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 281; Rosenberg and Lee, “Potato,” 10.

18. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 14.

19. 복녀는, 원래 가난은 하나마 정직한 농가에서 규칙 있게 자라난 처녀였었다, from Kim Tong-in, “Kamja,” 203; Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 281.

20. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 278.

21. Spurlin, “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation,” 206.

22. Sohn’s inconsistency shows itself further with his failure to mention another point of divergence that could mark translations as “correct” or “incorrect”: the varied renderings of as chŏngjik-han as “honest,” “moral,” and “upright.”

23. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 272; Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 1.

24. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 286.

25. Ibid., 271.

26. “Kamja” is not alone in this regard. The bible, for example, is perhaps one of the best-known translations with no single source. For more on the idea of the original text in regards to translation, see Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, 2.

27. Bassnett and Lefevere, Constructing Cultures, 133.

28. Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” 468.

29. Ibid., 466.

30. This sentiment does not necessarily apply to Korean literary studies within Korea. Sunghee Choi, for example, has written about the first Western novel translated into Korean, Chŏngbuwon (A Virtuous Woman’s Resentment), whose serialized newspaper translation, into Korean from English by way of Japanese, diverged notably from the original and was heavily influenced by the desires of readers. Choi suggests that the translator utilized footnotes and rewriting to create a radical yet publicly accepted translation. See Choi, “Chŏngbuwon ŭi Paeminisŭtŭ Bŏnyŏk Yangsang Yŏngu,” 267-293. Heekyoung Cho, Translation’s Forgotten History, 16.

31. As early as 1978, Itamar Even-Zohar urged scholars to consider how and why certain texts are selected for translation and how power dynamics between languages shape the translation ecology. Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature.”

32. Sohn, “A Comparative Analysis of Four English Translations,” 278.

33. Simon, Gender in Translation, 1.

34. Ibid., 29.

35. According to literary theorist William Spurlin, “The work of translation crosses social categories as well, producing new, hybrid forms of meaning and new knowledge through these very encounters, even calling into question the very borders themselves, linguistic or otherwise, at the point at which they are crossed.” Spurlin, “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation,” 202.

36. Federici and Leonardi, Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice, 1.

37. Godard, “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation,” 43.

38. Massardier-Kenney, “Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice,” 55. When “Kamja” was published, the ideas of the first-wave Western feminist movement had only recently reached Korea, and Korean feminist activists at the time were influenced by the work of Japanese and Western intellectuals. Although—or perhaps because—Japanese colonialism kept Korean feminists from advocating for suffrage like their Japanese and Western counterparts, they maintained their focus on financial independence for women; early feminist discourse in Korea revolved heavily around class and displayed socialist influences. Thus, looking at the multifaceted ways in which gender manifests in “Kamja” is not necessarily incongruous to the understanding of the word “feminism” in early 1900s Korea. Park, “Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea.”

39. Massardier-Kenney, “Towards a Redefinition of Feminist Translation Practice,” 56.

40. Wallace, “Writing the Wrongs of Literature,” 66.

41. Venuti, “Retranslations: The Creation of Value.”

42. Jung, introduction to Sweet Potato by Kim Tong-in, translated by Grace Jung, xvi.

43. Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, 210.

44. Ibid., 211.

45. Simon, Gender in Translation, 14.

46. von Flotow, “Feminist Translation,” 76.

47. Ibid., 75.

48. Ibid., 79.

49. The heavily revised translated novel Chŏngbuwon (introduced in note 30), for example, uses the feminist translation strategies noted by Sherry Simon in order to portray the main character’s escape from the social boundaries placed upon her by Confucian gender roles and Japanese colonialism. Interestingly, despite the low social status of women in Colonial Korea, the translator edits the novel to empower the main character, making the Korean translation more “feminist” than the original English version.

50. Kim Gahee, “Munhak Bŏnyŏk Taekŭsŭtŭ ŭi Chŏnyong.”

51. Spurlin, “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation,” 206.

52. Jung, Sweet Potato, xviii.

53. Jung, Sweet Potato, 97; and O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 14.

54. Jung’s inclusion of Korean words in her translation can also be understood as respect for the source text. Gayatri Spivak advocates for this approach when translating from non-Western to Western languages. The postcolonial translator, she states, “cannot translate from a position of monolingual authority”; instead, she must ensure that the “rhetoricity” of the source language is maintained in translation. Spivak, “The Politics of Translation.”

55. Jung, Sweet Potato, 97, 100.

56. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 17.

57. Ibid., 15.

58. Jung, Sweet Potato, 98.

59. Kim Tong-in, “Kamja,” 204.

60. The differing word choice between these two translations can additionally be explained, to some degree, by the existence of multiple Englishes. O’Rourke is Irish, and Jung is American; “cheeky hussy” and “bum,” though less inflammatory in tone than “little bitch” and “ass,” are more commonly used words in Ireland than in the United States.

61. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 17; and Jung, Sweet Potato, 102.

62. Jung, Sweet Potato, 96.

63. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 14.

64. Jung, Sweet Potato, 99.

65. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 17.

66. Jung, Sweet Potato, 103.

67. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 20.

68. Zhao and Yingyi, “Todŏkchŏk T’arakkwa Chaŭishik Sŏngjangŭi Ijungjŏk Sŏsa.”

69. Jung, Sweet Potato, 96. For more on the moral implications of Confucian class system in colonial Korea as portrayed in “Kamja,” see Zhao and Yingyi, “Todŏkchŏk T’arakkwa Chaŭishik Sŏngjangŭi Ijungjŏk Sŏsa.”

70. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 14.

71. Jung, Sweet Potato, 98.

72. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 16.

73. The original here reads, “선비의 집안에서 자라는 그는 그런 일을 할 수가 없었다.” Though the sentence denotes that Pong-nyŏ—who is from a “sŏnbi family”—“cannot do that kind of work,” the reason why she is unable to perform sex work is left unstated. O’Rourke’s more “literal” interpretation of this sentence, which, unlike Jung’s, does not explicate the strict code of norms to which Pong-nyŏ is subject, leads to the misogynistic tone of his translation. Kim Tong-in, “Kamja,” 203.

74. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 19.

75. Jung, Sweet Potato, 102.

76. O'Rourke, “Potatoes,” 20.

77. Jung, Sweet Potato, 104.

78. Simon, Gender in Translation, 8.

79. Scott, “Art Restoration and Its Contextualization,” 82.

80. Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” 459.

81. Jung, Sweet Potato, xvii–xviii.

82. Wallace, “Writing the Wrongs of Literature,” 70.

83. Ibid., 69.

84. For a discussion of mistakes in retranslations of Russian classics, see Sergay, “New but Hardly Improved,” 34.

85. Bensimon, Paul, “Présentation,” ix-xiii; Berman, Antoine, “La retraduction comme espace de la traduction,” 1-7.

86. Massardier-Kenney, “Toward a Rethinking of Translation,” 81.

87. Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen, for example, question whether the retranslation hypothesis truly is a problem or whether there is an outsized focus on dated “domesticating first translations” that create a “need for foreignizing retranslations.” Perhaps, they suggest, nondomesticating first translations exist as well but are not as frequently discussed. They demonstrate this with multiple case studies of first translations and retranslations into Finnish. Paloposki and Koskinen, “A Thousand and One Translations,” 28.

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Elizabeth Buehler

Elizabeth Buehler is a graduate student and Iowa Arts Fellow in the Division of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Iowa. Her translation of Table for One by Yun Ko Eun, which received a Daesan Translation Grant, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is now translating Yun’s novel The Disaster Tourist  for Serpent’s Tail.