Please read the essay instruction pdf very carefully!

All the readings are attached. Be sure to read all the reading, especially Suh’s Treacherous Translation Chapter 1,2 &4

The length of the essay should be eight to ten pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced). 

You are expected to write a carefully reasoned, clearly argued essay that reflects a firm grasp of the reading materials. In the introduction of your essay, you should clearly state what your main argument is. 

2020 Winter EA 150 Translation and Colonialism Take-Home Exam (40% of the Course Grade)
Deadline: 5 P.M. on March 19, 2020

A hardcopy of your essay should be submitted at the instructor’s office (HIB 472) before the deadline.
You can also drop it off in the instructor’s mailbox in the main office of the East Asian Studies
Department (HIB 443) (The department office closes around 4:30 P.M).

The length of the essay should be eight to ten pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced). The title of
the work you are referencing and the corresponding page number should be given in parentheses in the
main text [example: (The Gotha Programme, 16)].

You are expected to write a carefully reasoned, clearly argued essay that reflects a firm grasp of the
reading materials. In the introduction of your essay, you should clearly state what your main argument is.

We have read about various ideas of translation and related issues over the quarter. We started

with Roman Jakobson’s treatise, which examines the issue of translation from the perspective of
linguistics and George Steiner’s essay, which discusses the four modes of the hermeneutic motion
involved in the course of translation.

In contrast to Jakobson’s linguistic and Steiner’s hermeneutic approaches, Lydia Liu calls
attention to the intervention of political forces in the process of translation in the context of colonialism.
By drawing on the Marxian ideas of exchange value and use value, she examines the ways in which
unequal power dynamics between the West and the non-West conditioned the establishment of
equivalence between languages in the course of translation.

On the other hand, Naoki Sakai takes up the issue of translation by discussing two different
attitudes toward one’s relationship with the other; homolingual address and heterolingual address.
Ultimately, he criticizes the conventional idea of translation, which in his view reifies the boundaries of
nation states, and offers his theory of translation as a venue for destabilizing the subjectivity, which is
inseparably coupled with the nation state.

From the political approaches of Liu and Sakai, we moved on to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. By
criticizing the tradition of Western thought, which views discourse as conversation between two
interlocutors sharing common ground for understanding, Levinas looks at discourse as the site of ethics in
which “the I” (the self) reaches out to “the thou” (the other), who does not share anything in common
with the self and thus can challenge the self’s understanding of him or her.

As discussed in class, such a view of discourse as the site of ethics demands that the self should
hold the other higher than itself. In other words, Levinas’s ethics requires an unequal relationship between
the self and the other, and thus implicitly problematizes the idea of equality (symmetrical reciprocity),
which fails to take account of the self’s indefinite obligation to the other’s need. Karl Marx’s criticism of
Bourgeois equality helps clarify Levinas’s critique of symmetrical reciprocity. For Marx, genuine justice
can be achieved when Bourgeois equality is liquidated in favor of the Communist society in which one
receives as much as one needs rather than as much as he works for. Such an ideal society can be premised
only on the basis of an ethical principle akin to Levinas’s.

In that sense, it is crucial to remember that Levinas warns us that we cannot but fail to uphold the
other. Unlike Marx’s vision of the communist society, which will be achieved in the future, Levinas’s
ethics constantly reminds us that we will ultimately fail to be completely ethical no matter how much we
try. Ironically, the unavoidable failure of being ethical drives us to constantly try to be ethical in
Levinas’s thought.

Heather Tse

Finally, we read Fredric Jameson’s theory of third-world literature as national allegory and Aijaz
Ahmad’s rebuttal of it. Attempting to grapple with the radical difference of third world culture, Jameson
in the end advocates it. In his view, unlike in Western culture and literature, there is no split between the
private and the public, between poetics and politics, and the libidinal and the social in third world culture
and literature because of its historical experience of capitalism different from that of the West. Thus, third
world texts manifest social totality whereas first world texts primarily reveal fragmentations of society. In
response, Ahmad finds fault with Jameson’s argument that third-world literature is inevitably national
allegory. His criticism especially focuses on Jameson’s limited access to third world literature through
translation.

Keeping in mind the issues highlighted in the above overview of the course materials, discuss in your
essay which ideas of translation and the related issues presented in the course materials above Suh’s
chapters advocate and criticize, and why the chapters champion certain ideas and denounce others. You
are expected to demonstrate your full understanding of the course materials as well as Suh’s chapters.

Heather Tse

Treacherous Translation
Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism
in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s
ser k-bae suh
Global, Area, and International Archive
University of California Press
ber k eley los a ngeles london

Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
introduction 1
Translation and the Colonial Desire for Transparency
1. tr ansl ation and the communi t y of lov e 18
Hosoi Hajime and Translating Korea
2. tr e acherous tr ansl ation 46
The 1938 Japanese-Language Theatrical Version
of the Korean tale Ch’unhyangjŏn
3. the loc ation of “kor e an” cultur e 71
Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition
4. tr ansl at ion and i ts postcoloni al discontents 104
The Postwar Controversy over Tōma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s
Japanese Translations of Korean Poetry
5. towa rd a monolingual societ y 135
South Korean Linguistic Nationalism and Kim Suyŏng’s
Resistance to Monolingualism
Notes 161
Bibliography 199
Index 211
Contents

ix
A shorter and earlier version of Chapter Two was published under the
title “Treacherous Translation: The 1938 Japanese-Language Theatrical
Version of the Korean Tale Ch’unhyangjŏn” in positions: east asia cultures
critique (18:1, spring 2010). Part of the preface is derived from the same
article. An article based on Chapter Three appeared in the Journal of
Asian Studies (70:1, spring 2011) under the title “The Location of ‘Korean’
Culture: Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition.”
Archival research for Chapter Two was funded by generous sup-
port from the Japan– Korea Cultural Foundation. I extend my thanks to
Mizuno Naoki of Kyoto University for his help and support in Japan.
I also thank the UCI Humanities Center, which provided financial
support for preparing the final draft of the manuscript.
Last but not least, it should be noted that this book was supported by
the Academy of Korean Studies Grant (AKS-2012-S-01).
A number of people have read parts of the book at various stages of
its development and o}ered invaluable comments. I especially thank
Tani Barlow, Michael Bourdaghs, Leo Ching, Henry Em, Edward Fowler,
Takashi Fujitani, Theodore Hughes, Hajime Imamasa, Walter Lew, Liao
Chaoyang, Seiji Lippit, Seo Youngchae, and Gregory Vanderbilt. Their
comments, o}ered in various forms ranging from formal discussions
at conferences to casual conversations over drinks, inspired me to for-
mulate my arguments in the ways in which they are presented in the
book. Many thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers. I tried to
integrate their incisive and insightful comments and suggestions into the
final draft of the book. I only hope this book measures up to their support
and expectations.
I have been blessed to work with amazingly talented and intelligent
Acknowledgments

x / Acknowledgments
graduate students. Numerous conversations I had with them gave me
the invaluable opportunity to sensibly spell out some of the theoretical
problems I tackle in the book. My special thanks go to Hyonhui Choe,
Jessica Conte, Kazuko Osada, and Ken Yoshida. If they have learned from
me as much as I have from them, I will deserve to be very proud of myself
as a teacher.
I am equally lucky to have a number of colleagues at the University
of California, Irvine, and beyond who took an interest in the book and
encouraged me to keep going, especially when I felt it would never come
to fruition. I would like to express my gratitude to John Duncan, James
Fujii, Bruce Fulton, Jonathan Hall, Martin Huang, Kelly Jeong, Kyung
Hyun Kim, Jinkyung Lee, Namhee Lee, Margherita Long, D. Cuong
O’Neill, Robert Oppenheim, Bert Scruggs, Annmaria Shimabuku, Alan
Tansman, Je}rey Wasserstrom, Linda Vo, Lisa Yoneyama, and Jun Yoo
for their words of encouragement. Some of them might not be aware
how greatly their few words of kindness touched me and eased my doubt
about whether I could get this book published. Indeed, its publication
seemed an extremely remote possibility at times. Thus, I would like to
extend my sincerest thanks to Yung Sik Kim and John Lie, then editors
of The Seoul– California Series in Korean Studies, and Nathan MacBrien,
the publications director of the Global, Area, and International Archive,
for deciding to publish the book. I only wish I could thank them enough.
My thanks are also due to my editors Debbie Hardin and David
Peattie, whose professionalism and e�ciency turned the potentially
stressful experience of editing into a pleasant one. Working with them
led me to realize once again that writing a book is truly collaborative
work on many levels. Needless to say, however, all errors remain mine.
Finally, I mention Miriam Silverberg. Yes, I pronounce a proper name,
the name of my graduate adviser, a sign of her singularity, instead of
thanking her. First of all, she gave me so much support at the initial stage
of this book project that I cannot thank her enough in any sensible way.
More relevantly however, I cannot even attempt to thank her for her sup-
port if thanking her is an attempt on my part to reciprocate the generous
gift from her.
I thank many people here but Miriam belongs in another category.
When you thank somebody, you declare not only your gratitude but also
your willingness to reciprocate what you have received. The promise of
reciprocity is implicit in the simple expression of gratitude, “thank you.”
Here, at this moment, I thank my students, colleagues, and friends not
only because I feel grateful to them for what they have generously pro-

Acknowledgments / xi
vided for me but also because I know I will endeavor to reciprocate their
help and support, a generous gift, even though I am well aware that my
endeavors will miserably fail in the end. I will fail to reciprocate their
gift no matter how much I will try not because my feeling of gratitude is
insincere but because a genuine gift cannot be reciprocated. We cannot
but fail to reciprocate a genuine gift because, if it can be reciprocated, it
is not a gift anymore in the most fundamental sense of the word. Once
a gift is matched up with another gift of equal value in return, it has
already entered the cycle of favors in exchange between the giver and the
receiver. Although the symmetrical relationship bound by the exchange
of favors falls in the arena of economy, the asymmetrical relationship
established by an unreciprocated gift belongs in the realm of ethics.
I know my attempt to reciprocate my students’, friends’, and colleagues’
help and support will end in ultimate failure. Their support and help is
a genuine gift I cannot pay back in exact proportion to how much I have
benefited from it. Nevertheless, I should and will endeavor to reciprocate
the generous gift from those who have extended their helping hands. The
spirit of “nevertheless” is intrinsic to human decency.
I cannot even attempt to thank Miriam for her generous gift, however,
in the same way I thank my students, colleagues, and friends. I cannot
even make an ultimately failed attempt at reciprocity toward her because
she is not here with us anymore. If I thank her, there is a danger it will be
a mere pose lacking sincerity. Thus, here, at this very moment when I am
acknowledging all the help and support I have been blessed with, I only
mention her name: Miriam Silverberg.

xiii
This book grew out of my endeavor to examine the ways in which the
issues of translation and language were embedded in Korean and Japanese
discourses on nation, culture, and literature in the context of Japanese
colonial rule and its aftermath in Korea. More specifically, the book
examines the role of translation in shaping attitudes toward nationalism
and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse from the
1910s through the 1960s. Critiquing the conventional view of translation
as a representation of an original text, a view that was prevalent among
both Korean and Japanese intellectuals, I argue that, when theorized as
an ethical and political practice, translation challenges the ethnocentric
view of culture and language embedded in both colonialism and cultural
nationalism.
Translation in the colonial context means not just the translation of
texts between the language of the colonizer and that of the colonized.
It also entails the representation of the colonized’s culture and of the
colonized themselves. When framed as the faithful rendering of a text
from one language to another, translation is supposed to represent the
original text. In addition, there is another level of representation involved
in translation. In the commonly held view of translation, it is expected to
facilitate understanding of the culture to which the original text belongs.1
The assumption underlying such a view is that the translated text repre-
sents the source culture from which the original derives.
As further examined in Chapters 2 and 4, the issue of representation
comes up even more conspicuously in the case of translating a text from
the language of the colonized to that of the colonizer. Furthermore, not
only is the colonized’s culture represented but the colonizer’s cultural
identity is also imagined in terms of its di}erence from that of the colo-
Preface

xiv / Preface
nized through translation. As Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism,
the Western orientalists’ translation of Middle Eastern and Indian clas-
sics in the 18th and 19th centuries enabled the West to imagine its civili-
zation with respect to what it considered the Orient in the time of modern
colonialism.2 Focusing on cases of translation from the colonized’s lan-
guage to that of the colonizer, Tejaswini Niranjana has astutely criticized
the conventional view of translation as the faithful representation of the
original, a view that, she argues, is collusive with regimes of colonial
domination.3 However, the problem of representation is not limited to
the case of translation from the language of the colonized to that of the
colonizer. When translating from the colonizer’s language to that of the
colonized, the translator, whether colonizer or colonized, cannot help but
continuously compare the culture of colonizer with that of the colonized
so long as translation is defined not just as a linguistic transfer of mean-
ings but as the rendering of an original text rooted in one culture to a dif-
ferent language whose signifying system is specific only to its culture. In
the course of translation, the original text that is understood to represent
the colonizer’s culture is thus made to help essentialize the colonized’s
culture in terms of the latter’s di}erence from the former. Furthermore,
not only are the cultures of the colonizer and of the colonized reified
through representation, but the former also is made to register as the
norm against which the supposed deficiencies of the latter emerge in the
course of translation. Thus, for example, instances in which there are no
words in the colonized’s language that correspond to ideas highly valued
by the colonizer are often ascribed to failings in the colonized’s culture.
As in the case of translations by writers from Western colonizer
nations, Japanese translations of Korean history and literature repre-
sented the colonized and their culture and shaped Japanese colonial dis-
course on Korea. Korean cultural nationalism arose primarily in re sponse
to such colonial representations of culture and nation, as is the case of the
Korean intellectual An Hwak, whose treatise on Korean literary history
will be examined in Chapter 1.4 However, because of its ethnocentric view
of culture and language, Korean cultural nationalism failed to e}ectively
challenge colonialist claims about the legitimacy of colonial rule.
Despite political and economical disparities in power between the colo-
nizer and the colonized, the cultural nationalism of the colonized enables
them to imagine their own language and culture to be equal to those of
the colonizer. It does so by positing an autonomous and homogeneous
national community of language and culture. Linguistic and cultural
nationalism can also empower a politics of resistance by the colonized

Preface / xv
against colonial domination. However, it can also spur something akin
to the multiculturalism found in the United States, which carves out an
autonomous space for the cultures of the minority while fully accepting
the legitimacy of the dominant ruling groups. In other words, the lin-
guistic and cultural nationalism of the colonized stops short of question-
ing the legitimacy of colonial rule. Cultural nationalism consequently
fails to provide a radical critique of colonial domination. Furthermore,
the linguistic and cultural nationalism of the colonized rests on the fixed
identities of the colonizer and the colonized that rest on such essential-
ist foundations as ethnicity, tradition, culture, and language. Even while
occasionally causing friction with colonial rule, linguistic and cultural
nationalism as ideology thus works concentrically with colonialism,
which also depends on the same essentialist foundations.
If a nation is “an imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson has
argued, the act of imagining a nation is never complete but must be
repeated constantly not only to police borders with other nations but also
to reformulate boundaries to adapt to political, economic, and cultural
changes in society.5 Culture is the arena in which imagination draws and
redraws the boundaries of the nation. Although race as a pseudo bio-
logical concept has been denounced as an illegitimate marker, culture
remains accepted as an authentic delimiter of a nation, because a specific
culture is, with very few exceptions, associated with a national commu-
nity. Colonialism and its legacies have erected the frame in which the
nation is imagined in the realm of culture. As Nicholas Dirks reminds
us, not only has modern culture been shaped by colonialism, colonial
domination itself is enacted through culture.6
Literature is one main cultural institution in which nationalism and
colonialism converge in the imagining of national boundaries. The mod-
ern literary conventions of genre and narrative technique originated in
the European tradition and spread to non– Western societies through
colonial expansion. Through adaptation and appropriation, the modern
literature of non– Western societies has been written in vernacular lan-
guages, which, with few exceptions, are thought of only in connection
with national communities. Thus, literature is viewed as the linguistic
expression of a specific culture that is linked to a national community.
One of the common definitions of a national literature is a body of
literature created for the community of a nation. The concept may seem
natural, but the word nation resists clear definition, and even if its blurry
boundaries are determined, the community depends on transparent com-
municability among its members. One of the prerequisites for transpar-

xvi / Preface
ent communicability is a common language. Dependence on translation
to communicate marks one’s foreignness and condemns one to exclusion
from the community. In short, one who does not speak the language is
not really a member of the community.
It is often said that a major part of Koreans’ indignation at the Japa-
nese arose from the colonial policy of assimilation. This so-called dōka
seisaku (assimilation policy) consisted of a set of institutional measures
devised by the colonial government to make Koreans and other ethnic
groups within the empire into good subjects of the Japanese state.7 How-
ever, in contrast to its stated goals, the assimilation policy never aimed
to entirely assimilate the Koreans into the Japanese nation. Although
the Japanese colonial government occasionally denounced discrimina-
tion against Koreans by the Japanese, the need for such admonitions only
underscored the enduring discrimination that reflected the deeply rooted
prejudice among ordinary Japanese against Koreans. Furthermore, al –
though the stated aim was to eliminate institutionalized discrimina-
tion at some future point when Koreans were thoroughly assimilated
into Japan, the goal remained always out of reach. Discrimination could
disappear only when all the di}erences between the colonized and the
colonizers would vanish. The present di}erences between the colonized
and the colonizers served to justify discriminatory practices. Di}erence
cannot be dissociated from discrimination under colonialism. It should
not be surprising that some Koreans called for the renunciation of Korean
culture, language, and whatever di}erentiated them from the Japanese.8
However, the total abolition of discrimination was always deferred to the
future. Here was a case demonstrating how colonialism pivots on di}er-
ence between the colonizers and the colonized to preserve the colonial
hierarchy on which colonialism exists. Colonialism does not eradicate
di}erence. It reconfigures it.
Just as colonialism maintains di}erences between the colonized and
colonizers while claiming to erase them, translation simultaneously
points to the gulf between two languages while trying to bridge the gap.
As examined further in Chapter 2, translation can hypostatize borders
between two languages and thus accentuate the di}erence between two
autonomous and homogeneous communities.9 It is linguistic and cultural
nationalism that posits an autonomous and homogeneous community of
nation. The imagined autonomous and homogeneous community masks
the fact that no community is completely sterilized of foreignness and
free from the contamination of otherness.
If translation aims at transcending the di}erence between linguis-

Preface / xvii
tic and cultural communities, which are externally independent and
internally unified, the ideal of translation is to transfer a text from one
linguistic and cultural community to another without losing any seman-
tic or syntactic meaning. In other words, the ideal of translation in this
context is an equal exchange between two languages and cultures. The
view of translation as an equal exchange rests on the assumption that it
is possible to establish a reciprocal relationship between two languages,
overcoming the di}erences between them. In this sense, translatability
refers to the possibility of equivalents that bridge the gap between two
languages. Previous studies on colonial translation by Niranjana and
Lydia Liu, to name a few, have pointed out that the idea of translation as
an equal exchange is incongruent with colonial domination and politi-
cal asymmetry between the colonizer and the colonized. Whereas the
previous studies have primarily problematized the colonial intervention
in the process of translation, however, I want to focus my critique on the
homology between the logic of translation as equal exchange and colonial
discourse, which depends on narrative strategies that serve in the end to
justify and defend colonial domination and exploitation.10
One might argue that translation has more to do with the commensu-
rability between languages than with the exchange value between them.
Karl Marx’s analogy between the circulation of commodities and transla-
tion helps us see the relevance of the idea of exchange value in relation
to the way in which translation is conventionally understood. To explain
how money mediates the exchange of products and thus turn them into
commodities in circulation, Marx likened the exchangeability of prod-
ucts to translatability. He wrote,
To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language
does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved
and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity,
like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from
language. Ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother
tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to
become exchangeable, offer a somewhat better analogy; but the anal-
ogy then lies not in language, but in the foreignness of language.11
In other words, the foreignness of language requires translation in the
same way as the di}erence between products in exchange necessitates the
concept of exchange value, that is, the value of one product expressed as
the use value of another product. Commensurability itself is not inherent
in languages but is rather made possible by the equivalencies translation
can provide for languages.

xviii / Preface
Since Marx, quite a few scholars in translation studies have employed
the trope of exchange to explain translation. George Steiner is one nota-
ble example. Steiner suggests that the ideal for translation is “exchange
without loss” between languages.12 Liu also uses Marxian concepts of use
and exchange value in her study of translations from Western languages
to Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Liu points out,
the creation of equivalents between languages is far from innocent of
political intervention, and all the more so in colonial translation. In other
words, in Liu’s view, translation is not symmetrically reciprocal between
two languages. Production of equivalents is conditioned by the power
relations between two language communities. While acknowledging
the relevance of a new approach in colonial and postcolonial studies that
emphasizes translation as the site of resistance, Liu, however, warns us
that the trend could reduce the history of colonial translation into a single
narrative about the struggles of the colonized resisting the Western colo-
nial domination. She insists rather on looking at translation as a more
nuanced site of “resistance, domination, and appropriation.”13
In contrast with Liu’s view of translation as a venue in which the domi-
nant and the dominated conflict and negotiate with each other, I posit
that colonial translation is premised on the idea of exchange between the
colonizers and the colonized as equal parties. In other words, I focus my
analysis on the collusion between colonial discourse and the idea of equal
exchange implicated in the conventional view of translation that involves
constituting equivalencies between languages. Insistence on equal and
reciprocal exchanges in the conventional view of translation eerily paral-
lels the emphasis on the reciprocal and equally beneficial relationship
between the colonized and the colonizer in colonial discourse. For exam-
ple, as discussed further in Chapter 2, Japanese colonial discourse was
replete with rhetoric, as well as statistics, seeking to establish the belief
that Japanese colonial rule was equally beneficial to Koreans as it was to
Japanese, if not more so. Colonial discourse assumes a reciprocal rela-
tionship between the colonizer and the colonized even as power dispari-
ties enable colonial injustice and exploitation to prevail. It is not di�cult
to argue the absurdity of a colonial discourse that assumes the colonial
relationship to be an equal exchange. But the complicity and homology
between colonial discourse and the view of translation as equal exchange
has not been closely scrutinized. Although colonial translation can be a
site of struggle and negotiation between the colonized and the coloniz-
ers, as Liu argues, that definition does not o}er a fundamental critique
of colonial domination. In other words, the collusion between colonial

Preface / xix
translation and colonial domination cannot be exposed to make a radical
critique unless the idea of equal exchange itself is carefully examined and
critiqued. I am not proposing that translation is inherently collusive with
colonial domination. Rather, I suggest a di}erent view of translation as
an ethical as well as political practice. Translation thus radicalized resists
the lure of cultural and linguistic nationalism on the part of the colonized
as well as the colonial enterprise of domination.
Drawing on the work of such thinkers as Marx, Emmanuel Levinas,
and Jacques Derrida, I conceptualize translation as an ethical and politi-
cal practice that interrupts the tyrannical dictation of the self over the
other and thus enables the former to encounter the latter in language.
Translation thus theorized highlights the ethical aspect of language as
a venue in which self and other can engage in dialogue without silenc-
ing unbridgeable di}erences. It also emphasizes translation’s potential
to create an anticolonial politics by exposing heterogeneity within the
languages and cultures of both colonizer and colonized, thereby disrupt-
ing the homogeneous linguistic and cultural communities promulgated
by the colonial hierarchy.
There are three main reasons why I base my criticism of colonialism
on Levinas’s thought. First, Levinas’s ethics is premised on the radical
alterity of the other.14 According to Levinas, the absolute alterity of the
other subjects the self to questioning its own legitimacy and orders the
self to act ethically toward the other.15 The self should not and cannot
speak, think, or behave on behalf of the other. Colonial domination is
an exemplary mode of rule that prevents the self from encountering the
alterity of the other. By the logic of colonialism, it is the colonizers who
decide what the colonized should do. To legitimize their domination, the
colonizers make it their moral obligation to bring in modern economic,
political, and cultural institutions to enlighten the colonized, who they
believe cannot civilize themselves on their own. Put simply, the coloniz-
ers believe they know better than the colonized what is good for them.
Thus, after the Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895), the Japanese statesman
Itō Hirobumi lamented that Korea was “quite incapable of reform from
within” and that “those [reforms] which Japan had endeavored to introduce
seemed a long way o} from being realized.”16 Itō’s words demonstrate the
tyranny of colonialist subjectivity. The colonizers think, speak, and act
on behalf of the colonized. There is no room for the absolute otherness in
such a mode of thinking. In criticizing the logic of colonial domination
that disrespects the alterity of the colonized, I rely on Levinas’s ethics.
Second, recent trends in colonial and postcolonial studies have empha-

xx / Preface
sized the importance of ambivalence in colonial discourse, as explicated
in Homi Bhabha’s seminal book The Location of Culture. I agree with
Bhabha that colonial discourse is replete with ambivalence resulting from
its simultaneous recognition and denial of the di}erence between the
colonized and the colonizer. However, I am also concerned that emphasis
on colonial ambivalence tends to dismiss the clear di}erences between
the colonized and the colonizer. As Bhabha points out, the nationalist
critique of colonialism bogs down in the binary opposition between the
colonized and the colonizer. It is true that the nationalism of the colo-
nized is as fixated on such essentialist foundations as ethnicity, culture,
and language as the colonizer’s justification of the colonial hierarchy.17
Certainly, the cultural and linguistic nationalism of the colonized often
fails to o}er radical resistance to colonial domination exactly because it
does not aim to eradicate the mode of the essentialist identification and
instead merely reverses the order of the hierarchy. Such nationalism also
does not capture “the third space” of colonial reality that Bhabha regards
as the site of resistance to colonialism and the criticism of both colonial-
ism and nationalism that are based on binary oppositions. More impor-
tant, colonial nationalism seldom tackles colonial injustice done to people
who are outside of the supposed national community of the colonized.
Nevertheless, it is still necessary to retain a clear separation between
the colonizer and the colonized to force the colonizer to face his or her
all-encompassing ethical responsibility for colonial violence. Levinasian
ethics o}ers a way to criticize the essentialist identity on which both the
colonized’s nationalism and the colonizer’s domination hinge, while at
the same time retaining the irreducible di}erence between the colonizer
and the colonized. The ethical argument Levinas inspires me to make
does not blur the separation between the colonized and the colonizer
even though it attempts to criticize both colonialism and the cultural and
linguistic nationalism of the colonized. The ethical relationship that I
advocate entails a clear demarcation between the colonized and the colo-
nizer. However, the separation between the colonized and the colonizer
does not rest on such essentialist foundations as ethnicity, language, tra-
dition, or culture. The di}erence between the colonized and the coloniz-
ers rather is situated in the history of colonial violence. It is the history of
Japanese colonial domination, not any essentialist foundations of identity
that posit the di}erences between Koreans and Japanese.
Third, the Levinasian notion of eschatology leads us to reflect on the
inherent violence in the representation of the past and o}ers a way into
an “ethical history.” It might be seen as implausible to invoke Levinasian

Preface / xxi
ethics in defense of history because Levinas is critical of history for total-
izing the di}erences between individuals’ experiences into “a coherent
discourse.”18 This violent aspect of history is inevitable when recounting
the experiences of those in the past who are no longer present and thus
deprived of their own voices. Thus, in history, the individual is presented
only “in the third person.” However, Levinas does not completely rule
out the possibility of an ethical way of recounting the past, proposing
that eschatology can disrupt the tyranny of history. In his view, escha-
tology upholds the singularity of the individual because, unlike history,
it grants individuals the right to speak for themselves. But at the same
time, eschatology does not allow individuals to say whatever they want
because it prioritizes the alterity of the other over individual freedom.
When an individual’s fear that death will deprive her of her own voice
turns into concern over the murder of the alterity of the other, the pos-
sibility of eschatology emerges.
Before proceeding further, however, I need to explicate in more detail
the possibility of the political actualization of Levinasian ethics to justify
this book’s theoretical orientation.
Although Levinas is critical of politics as the realm of power relations,
the problem of politics is at the heart of his thinking on ethics. As Levinas
explains it, the self ’s ethical responsibilities to the other can come into
conflict because the world is inhabited by multiple others. Often the self
has to prioritize one “other” over another to uphold justice. This can only
be accomplished through politics. Nevertheless, Levinas has been criti-
cized for his political position. For example, many who admired him as
a philosopher of ethics were befuddled by his hesitation in denouncing
the state of Israel for the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps at
Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Thus, Slavoj Žižek criticizes Levinas for the
unbridgeable distance between his “high theory” and his “vulgar com-
monsensical reflections” on real politics.19
As a matter of fact, Levinas’s uncompromising insistence on the abso-
lute alterity of the other poses an almost insurmountable problem to any
attempt to ground criticism of such political injustice as colonialism in
his ethics.20 If the other is beyond the self ’s grasp, relentlessly resisting
the self ’s assimilation of the other into the self ’s own consciousness and
thus questioning the certainty of the self ’s legitimacy, is it still possible
to thematize the other as the colonized? Once we tie the other to the
colonized, will we not e}ace the absolute alterity of the other? In a word,
the question is whether the other in Levinasian ethics can be concretized
as others who su}er from injustices and thus calls for our intervention

xxii / Preface
in politics to bring justice. This di�culty of making sense of the other
as those who are oppressed in the real world is often interpreted as the
ine}ectiveness and impracticality of Levinas’s ethics and has even been
viewed as the result of his political conservatism. Thus when Levinas
was hesitant to designate Palestinian refugees as the other, his failure
to address the violence of the Israeli state against Palestinians seemed
to have come not only from his never neutral attitude toward Israel but
also from political ine}ectiveness or even perniciousness inherent in his
ethics.21
It is possible to push the issue even further to the point of questioning
the very possibility of Levinasian ethics by raising the following ques-
tion: How can Levinas speak of the other if it exceeds the self ’s cognitive
power and evades the self ’s understanding? If talking about the other
inevitably involves thematizing it in discourse and consequently regard-
ing the other as an object knowable to the self, ultimately turning the
di}erence of the other into something assimilable to the same, then did
Levinas not end up betraying the very premise of his own ethical prin-
ciple as soon as he spoke and wrote about the other? Is ethical language
possible when incorporating the other into discourse unavoidably vio-
lates the alterity of the other?22
Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being can be seen as his response to such
questions. In the book, Levinas distinguishes the two aspects of lan-
guage, the saying and the said. The said is the thematizing aspect of
language, what is said, whereas the saying is the aspect of language that
far exceeds thematization and thus remains beyond and outside what is
said.23 Risking oversimplification, it can be argued that the saying refers
to an event of speech whereas the said constitutes the message or content
of speech. The saying points to the essence of language that is ethical
because it instances the primordial moment in which language begins
with the other.
Being faithful to Levinas’s words, it can be said that the other is never
synchronous with the self. If the other were contemporaneous with the
self, the other could be brought into the consciousness of the self.24 The
other never coincides with the self, however. Rather, the other comes up
only as a trace, what Levinas calls the face. The face discloses itself as the
saying. The face of the other demands that the self respond and orders the
self to enact a saying of its own. Speech thus emerges with the other with
whom the self desires to engage. The self ’s desire arises neither from free
will nor from egoistic need but from the shame that the other evokes.25
The self ’s shame in turn coincides with the demand to be responsive and

Preface / xxiii
responsible and constitutes the following questions: Have I not harmed
the other to be here at this moment? Have I not usurped the other’s place?
Without the saying, the said is oblivious of the essence of language
that is ethical.26 Such obliviousness misleads us into seeing language
only as a tool for the transmission of ideas. If the essence of language
is to transmit ideas (the said) between interlocutors, then such a view
will ultimately confirm the self ’s cognitive power because that means the
self can understand others in dialogue well enough to safely assume that
what the self takes its interlocutor to mean corresponds su�ciently to
what is actually meant. However, can the self hold up the absolute alter-
ity of the other if it is complacent about its understanding of the other?
Does complacency not lead to the confirmation of the self ’s legitimacy
with respect to the other? Levinas’s di}erentiation of the saying from
the said makes it possible to see the ethicality of language, which the
saying points to. Although the view of language as a tool for transmitting
ideas is premised on the belief that interlocutors can understand each
other well enough, Levinas’s emphasis on the saying is a reminder that
“enough” is never enough and language is never reduced to the said.27 By
illuminating the ethical aspect of language and questioning the primacy
of the said in the conventional understanding of language, the saying
disrupts the certainty of the self ’s legitimacy that the said prioritizes.
For Levinas, language is the privileged venue in which the self comes
closer to the other. However, there is no guarantee that the self can ever
reach the other. On the contrary, the self is always exposed to the risk of
being ignored and misunderstood by the other in dialogue. Rather than
being able to confirm the legitimacy of the self, the self is deprived of the
certainty of its legitimacy in conversation with the other. The self is not
only vulnerably exposed to misunderstanding and indi}erence but also
held solely responsible for respecting the saying without reducing it to
the said. If “I” is misunderstood and ignored, it is only “me” who should
be responsible. If “I” is accused of misunderstanding and indi}erence, it
is also “me” who should be found guilty.
The di�culty of actualizing politics based on Levinasian ethics per-
sists, however, because politics, even if it is emancipatory, never allows
for such rigorous insistence on the alterity of the other as demanded
by Levinasian ethics. Then, despite the above justification for basing
my criticism of colonialism on Levinas’s ethics, should I not admit that
Levinasian ethics inevitably falls into the fetishization of the other that
is ultimately impractical and even completely useless, politically speak-
ing? Is there any way to salvage Levinas’s ethics from the aforementioned

xxiv / Preface
accusation? I believe one way to argue for the relevance of Levinas’s eth-
ics to politics involves answering the following question: How does the
ethicality of language translate into anything relevant to politics? As
discussed above, the seeming impossibility of transition from ethics to
politics in Levinas’s thought derives from the fact that his rigorous insis-
tence on the absolute alterity of the other prevents the other from being
readily concretized as others. The entangled and complicated relationship
between the saying and the said is helpful in understanding the equally
entangled and complicated relationship between ethics and politics in
Levinas’s thought.
As mentioned above, despite the obvious privilege he assigns to the
saying over the said, Levinas does not fail to emphasize that the saying
cannot manifest itself without the said.28 Although the saying precedes
the said, it cannot materialize without being coupled with the said. Put
simply, the saying as an event cannot occur without being said. Thus,
the manifestation of saying requires the said. Likewise, the other cannot
manifest itself other than in the appearance of an other. Even though it
is imperative to be alert to the fact that any understanding of the other
as a concrete other, a person who su}ers political persecution, inevitably
risks assimilating the other to consciousness and thus violating his or her
alterity, it is also necessary to recognize that no encounter with the other
can materialize except as an encounter with a concrete human being with
whom the self desires to engage not because it egotistically desires com-
panionship but because the appearance of the other evokes shame in the
self and demands that it be responsible for the other’s su}erings.
It might be helpful to discuss Levinas’s essay titled “Dialogue” to
further examine how his ethics are indeed relevant to politics. Levinas
begins the essay with an observation that, since World War I, not only
politicians but also philosophers have valued dialogue as a venue in
which people are meeting each other to talk out disagreements and dif-
ferences and reach consensus peacefully. He however asserts that the idea
of dialogue premised on the tradition of Western thought does not live up
to the meaning of genuine dialogue, because, in the tradition of Western
thought, dialogue is conventionally regarded as taking place between
two interlocutors who share a common foundation for knowledge, be
it God (as in Judeo– Christian theology), reason (as in rationalism), or
custom (as in Humean empiricism). In the idea of dialogue premised on
the common ground of knowledge, there is no room for encountering the
other who is outside and beyond such a common ground. To Levinas,
such a dialogue based on the common ground is not a genuine dialogue

Preface / xxv
but rather a monologue. A more serious problem found in such an idea of
dialogue is that the powerful often impose their ways of thinking on the
powerless as the common ground for dialogue.29 The lack of violence in
this case is not real peace because it is contingent on the suppression of
the voice of others. Levinas highlights in the work of Martin Buber and
Gabriel Marcel on dialogue the possibility of ethics that enables “the I” to
encounter the absolute other.
What captures my attention in Levinas’s essay is the fact that his con-
cern about real politics inspired him to engage with Buber and Marcel
philosophically and to radicalize their thoughts by reading the ethics of
alterity into them. For him, the conventional understanding of dialogue,
which is based on a common ground of knowledge, cannot ensure genu-
ine peace. Levinas calls for ethics to question the legitimacy of politics,
which often masks the suppression of the powerless and mistakes the lack
of physical violence for peace. In other words, in his view, ethics is called
for to disrupt politics as the latter goes about its usual business. What
we should call attention to is the fact that incongruity between ethics
and politics enables the former to interrupt the latter. Ethics can disrupt
politics because it is beyond politics. If the realm of ethics coincides with
that of politics, there is no way ethics can interrupt politics from outside.
When politics is put in line with ethical demands, it is interrupted by eth-
ics, which demands that the self ask and answer the following questions:
Am I good to others, the humanity who are other to me? How can I be in
good conscience when fellow human beings are su}ering? What should
I do to bring justice to the powerless? The point is that, in order to be
ethical, one must never be in good conscience. Thus, Levinasian ethics,
which concerns the alterity of the other, passes toward a mode of politics,
which infinitely demands that the self care about others, especially those
who are oppressed.
It might be said that concern about the other without considering oth-
ers is politically empty, and care about others without upholding the other
is ethically blind. In that sense, radical politics inspired by Levinasian
ethics is not so far away from the spirit of Marx, whose political program
anticipates the advent of a new society founded on the ethical imperative,
in other words, “from each according to his ability, to each according to
his need.”30 In Chapter 2, I read Marx through the lens of Levinas to high-
light ethics in Marx’s political economy, and I read Levinas through the
lens of Marx to rescue radical politics from the limits of Levinas’s ethics.
Finally, Derrida is also relevant to my criticism of both colonialism
and cultural and linguistic nationalism. His criticism of foundationalism

xxvi / Preface
calls into question cultural essentialist presumptions embedded in such
phrases as Korean nation, Japanese literature, and Western civilization. For
example, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, Derrida’s theory of supplement
is helpful for looking at how colonial ideology subsumes the colonized’s
culture within the colonizer’s culture, while at the same time essentional-
izing the latter as distinct from and superior to the former. Furthermore,
Derrida, who was born and raised in colonized Algeria, deliberates on the
linguistic situation of the colonial society in his book Monolingualism of
the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin.31 He provocatively argues that “all
culture is originarily colonial” and that language plays the essential role
in enabling culture to legitimize domination.32 Derrida’s insights are also
helpful for examining the violent nature of the monolingual language
policy that standardized the Korean language and stamped out the use
of the Japanese language in liberated Korea after 1945. As discussed in
Chapter 5, the majority of Korean intellectuals deemed it necessary to
implement a monolingual language policy in liberated Korea. Derrida’s
insights o}er a critique of the nationalist argument that the suppression
of the Japanese language was necessary to unify Korean society and to
purge Japanese colonial legacies.
organization of this book
Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea
and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s comprises an introductory essay
and five chapters. By analyzing short stories written during the colonial
period by the Korean writer Kim Saryang (1914– 1950) and the Japanese
writers Nakajima Atsushi (1909– 1942) and Nakanishi Inosuke (1887–
1958), in the introductory essay I aim to lay out the concerns and issues
addressed throughout the book. More specifically, by focusing on the
translators featured in the stories, I examine the ways in which those
literary texts reveal the colonizer’s unease over translation as the neces-
sary but imperfect mediation that frustrates transparent communication
with the colonized. I argue that the colonizer’s anxiety over translation,
as manifested in the literary texts, is related to the desire to reconfirm
his or her authorial and authoritarian voice. Finally, by examining the
preface the Japanese poet Kitahara Hakushū (1885– 1942) wrote for the
1929 Japanese translation of Korean folk songs published by Kim Soun
(1908– 1981), I further argue that translation can open up the possibility
of a critical reflection on the idea of the unified national subjectivity on
which colonial discourse pivots.

Preface / xxvii
In Chapter 1, “Translation and the Community of Love: Hosoi Hajime
and Translating Korea,” I examine the treatises the Japanese journal-
ist Hosoi Hajime (1886– 1934) wrote in the 1910s and 1920s on trans-
lation, culture, and Korea. A prolific translator of the Korean classical
canon, Hosoi regarded his translation projects as an e}ort to facilitate
Japanese understanding of the Korean nation and culture. He implored
his Japanese readers to love and embrace Koreans as their own family. By
analyzing Hosoi’s texts on national character and literature in relation
to Korean nationalist intellectual An Hwak’s treatise on the same topics,
I show how the concept of national literature intervened in shaping the
identities of colonizer and colonized. I also aim in this chapter to examine
translation’s role in schematizing national character, as demonstrated in
Hosoi’s texts. Hosoi revealed his disregard of translation by using “trans-
lation” as a trope to signify “unreflective imitation” and “copying” that is
inferior to the original, while simultaneously stressing the importance of
Japanese translations of Korean literature. I argue that despite the seem-
ing contradiction, Hosoi’s high regard for, and mistrust of, translation
both resulted from conventional views of translation as a representation
of an original. Finally, I read Hosoi’s treatises on Japanese colonial rule
over Korea through the lens of G. W. F. Hegel, because Hegel’s ideas of
law, love, family, and community foreshadow the contradiction inher-
ent in Hosoi’s justification of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Hegel
is helpful for understanding the ways in which Hosoi’s concept of love
cannot but fail to bind Japanese and Koreans together despite his hope
that the power of love can enable colonized and colonizers to overcome
their di}erences in language, culture, and ethnicity.
In Chapter 2, “Treacherous Translation: The 1938 Japanese-Language
Theatrical Version of the Korean Tale Ch’unhyangjŏn,” I discuss the Japa-
nese theatrical company Shinkyō’s controversial 1938 Japanese-language
staging of the popular Korean romance Ch’unhyangjŏn (The Tale of Spring
Fragrance). Although the performance garnered favorable reviews from
Japanese critics, the Japanese-language version Ch’unhyangjŏn received
uniformly unfavorable, skeptical, and even hostile responses from
Korean critics, who regarded it as a poor translation of the original story.
Despite the disagreements between Japanese and Korean intellectuals
about the play, however, the idea of translation as equal exchange was
embedded both in the colonizers’a�rmation of the play as an exemplary
step toward cultural assimilation and the colonized’s protests against it
as an “inaccurate” or “unfaithful” translation. As discussed earlier, such
insistence on equal exchange in translation colluded with the idea of

xxviii / Preface
symmetrical reciprocity between the colonizer and the colonized in colo-
nialist propaganda. Moreover, such emphasis on reciprocity persistently
pervades the current discourse that justifies neo-imperialist aggression
on a global scale. I draw on Marx and Levinas in examining Korean and
Japanese responses to the Japanese theatrical group Shinkyō’s staging of
the Korean folk tale Ch’unhyangjŏn because Marx and Levinas o}er a
valuable theoretical framework for criticizing the ideas of equal exchange
and reciprocity that underpinned both Korean cultural nationalism,
which ended up retreating from political resistance to a more conciliatory
insistence on cultural autonomy, and Japanese justification of cultural
interactions between Japan and Korea, which colluded with Japanese
colonial rule over Korea.
In Chapter 3, “The Location of ‘Korean’ Culture: Ch’oe Chaesŏ and
Korean Literature in a Time of Transition,” I focus on Ch’oe Chaesŏ
(1908– 1964), a leading Korean intellectual, active translator of English
literary criticism, and chief editor of Kokumin Bungaku (National Litera-
ture), a prominent Japanese-language journal published in colonial Korea
from 1941 to 1945. Ch’oe asserted that the unfolding of history in the
20th century demanded a paradigmatic transition from liberalism and
individualism to state-centered nationalism in culture and literature. He
also privileged everyday life as allowing people to live as members of
communities that ultimately are integrated into the state. By positioning
Koreans as subjects of the Japanese state who were equal to the Japa-
nese people, his argument implied that the colonized should be treated
on a par with the colonizers. Further, Ch’oe advocated Koreans’ cultural
autonomy as an ethnic group within the Japanese empire. Rather than
hastily celebrating Ch’oe’s logic of collaboration as a subversive disrup-
tion of the colonial hierarchy, I contextualize his thoughts on nation,
culture, and literature with those of contemporary Korean, Japanese, and
Western intellectuals and explore how his concepts of history and every-
day life enabled him simultaneously to justify Japanese colonialism’s
political domination of Korea and to defend Koreans’ cultural autonomy.
By comparing Ch’oe’s critical essays on literature, culture, and politics
with his own Japanese translations of the same essays, I also analyze the
way in which the originals and the translations addressed a slightly dif-
ferent readership. I argue that such a miniscule di}erence in the assumed
readership between the Korean originals and the Japanese translations,
however, interrupts the univocal signification of such concepts as tra-
dition, culture, Japan, and Korea on which Ch’oe’s essays pivoted. The
di}erence reveals that the meanings of such concepts are undecidable in

Preface / xxix
Derrida’s sense. The undecidability inherent in the significations of the
concepts ultimately undermines Ch’oe’s discursive strategy that aimed
to expand the conceptual boundaries of the Japanese nation (kokumin) to
include Koreans and at the same time advocated the autonomy of Korean
culture within the empire of Japan.
In Chapter 4, “Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents: The Post –
war Controversy over Tōma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s Japanese
Translations of Korean Poetry,” I examine the postcolonial controversy
over Japanese leftist historian Tōma Seita’s interpretations of a collec-
tion of Korean poetry, which Kim Soun, on whose folk song translations
Kitahara Hakushū commented, translated into Japanese during the colo-
nial period. In a series of essays from 1954, Tōma read into the poems an
allegory of the Korean nation’s su}ering under Japanese rule. However,
Kim denounced Tōma’s politicization of what he considered lyrical poems
because, in his view, Tōma, who could not read Korean, misrepresented
the poems and Korean culture by relying on Kim’s own Japanese transla-
tions. What Kim did not mention in his denunciation, however, was the
fact that some of what he considered Tōma’s misinterpretations resulted
from Kim’s own problematically loose translations. The controversy
poses questions concerning the relationship between history and litera-
ture, the ethics of translation, and the epistemological violence inherent
in representation. In this chapter I attempt to respond to such questions
by examining Tōma’s essays on Korean poetry and Kim’s criticism of
them. To bring out the theoretical implications of the issues involved in
the controversy, I discuss them through Fredric Jameson’s controversial
essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” in
which he looked at non– Western literature as national allegory. In the
1950s, many Japanese leftist intellectuals saw the Japanese as a nation
oppressed under U.S. hegemony and aligned postwar Japanese national-
ism with the nationalisms of other Asian peoples, especially the Chinese
and Koreans, whom they regarded as beneficiaries of national liberation.
By contextualizing the controversy in the torrent of early 1950s debates
among Japanese leftist intellectuals about what constitutes progressive
national literature intent on challenging both rightwing nationalism and
American dominance in Japan, I also treat the controversy’s potential for
encouraging a just relationship between the former colonized and colo-
nizer by drawing on Levinas’s notion of eschatology as an alternative to
history in recounting the past.
In Chapter 5, “Toward a Monolingual Society: South Korean Linguistic
Nationalism and Kim Suyŏng’s Resistance to Monolingualism,” I tackle

xxx / Preface
national language in South Korea after its liberation from Japanese
colonial rule. During the colonial period, Japanese was privileged and
promoted as the o�cial language of the Japanese empire in Korea. In
the wake of the country’s liberation from Japan, the whole spectrum of
Korean intellectuals agreed, despite vast political di}erences, that it was
necessary to rigidly standardize Korean as the national language while
suppressing the use of Japanese to build a homogeneous national cul-
ture. The prominent poet and prolific translator Kim Suyŏng (1921– 1968)
belonged to the generation of Koreans who were forced to learn Japanese
during the colonial period, only to be coerced again into using exclusively
Korean after the liberation. Kim left a series of notes on his poetry that
attest to the lingering presence of colonial bilingualism in postliberation
South Korea despite the state’s systematic e}orts at suppression. In his
notes, Kim confessed that his writing continually negotiated between
Korean and Japanese. Kim’s case raises questions about the ideology of
a national language that works to obliterate the foreignness of language
and reinforces monolingualism as a cultural community’s normative lin-
guistic condition. Kim’s notes on his poetry highlight his role as a rare
“critical intellectual” who warned against monolingualism’s repressive
nature in postliberation South Korea.

1
Several years ago, while searching digital archives for Korean intellectu-
als’ critical essays on literary translations published during the colonial
period, I came across a newspaper article from 1930 reporting that six
detectives from the Chongno Police Station in colonial Seoul had finished
translating into Japanese within three days the mission statements and
policies of a communist group under investigation for subversive activi-
ties.1 The article conveys a sense of self-congratulation on the part of
the police that they could successfully submit the translated evidence
to the prosecutor’s o�ce so quickly. There was nothing new about the
colonial authorities’ persecution of Korean revolutionaries and the story
would have escaped my notice except that it calls attention to the fact
that Japanese colonial bureaucracy and colonial rule itself required a vast
number of the colonial functionaries who performed the everyday task
of translator.
As a matter of fact, the main task of most Korean o�cers in the Japa-
nese colonial police was to translate between their Japanese colleagues
and the colonized. After the March First movement in 1919, the colonial
government used monetary incentives to encourage Japanese police o�-
cers to learn Korean. Although the number of Japanese police o�cers
conversant in Korean gradually increased as a result, most Japanese police
o�cers could not do their police work without the help of translators.2
Since my encounter with this article, which serves as a reminder that
Japanese colonial rule depended on translation and its practitioners to
sustain itself, various figures of translators have come to my attention
from colonial-era literature written by both Korean and Japanese writers.
Nakajima Atsushi’s 1929 “Junsa no Iru Fūkei: 1923nen no Hitotsu no
Sukecchi” (Landscape with Policeman: A Sketch of 1923) tells the story
Introduction
Translation and the Colonial Desire
for Transparency

2 / Introduction
of one such colonial functionary/translator, a Korean o�cer in the Japa-
nese colonial police named Cho Kyoyŏng.3 The majority of the transla-
tors working to make sure that colonial power pervaded every nook of
colonized society came from the Japanese colonial police.4 As a colonial
functionary, Cho is disliked by the colonized. Unlike his Japanese col-
leagues, he is also mistrusted by the colonizers. In the eyes of the colo-
nized, he is a traitor, a transgressor of the bonds of blood with his nation.
On the other hand, he is viewed with suspicion by the colonizers as a
potential saboteur who might manipulate communication between the
colonized and the colonizers. In other words, he is a translator who per-
forms the thankless task of translation. Witnessing daily discrimination
by Japanese settlers against his fellow Koreans, Cho agonizes over his
split loyalties to the Japanese state and the Korean nation.
In the end, Cho is fired because he clashes with his superior over how
to treat the case of a brawl between Korean and Japanese teenagers. The
story does not inform the reader what exactly is the cause of Cho’s argu-
ment with his boss about but only implies that he demands fair treat-
ment for the Korean students. After receiving the notice of termination
and severance money, Cho wanders around and ends up squandering his
severance money on a prostitute. The story ends with Cho running to a
group of manual laborers sleeping in the street, and his final words are
a lament: “you, you, this peninsula . . . this nation.” Cho lost his stable
source of income, but he has also broken free from the precarious posi-
tion of translator between the colonizer and the colonized.
While Nakajima’s story hints at the precarious position between the
colonizers and the colonized to which the colonial translator/functionary
is condemned, a scene in Kim Saryang’s 1940 Japanese-language short
story “Kusa Fukashi” (Deep Grass) describes the ways in which transla-
tion works to maintain the linguistic hierarchy in the colony.5 The story
concerns an unexpected reunion between Pak Insik, a Korean medi-
cal student at Tokyo Imperial University, and his high school teacher.
While Insik is visiting his uncle, a magistrate in a remote mountainous
region in Korea where he and other Korean students are to participate in
a medical volunteer program for slash-and-burn farmers, he unexpect-
edly meets his high school Korean language teacher, whose students
have nicknamed him “Noseblower.” “Noseblower” was a laughing stock
in Insik’s high school, where nobody took the subject of Korean language
and literature seriously. To make matters worse, the teacher’s servility
toward his Japanese colleagues embarrassed the Korean students. He
was one of the teachers whose resignation Insik and his classmates had

Introduction / 3
demanded when they organized a classroom walk-out. Now, six years
later, Insik discovers that his former teacher is working as a clerk for his
conceited and vainglorious uncle, the colonial bureaucrat.
In the scene in question, “Noseblower” is translating the magistrate’s
less-than-fluent Japanese-language speech for villagers. The magistrate’s
speech does not flow well in the ears of his nephew Insik, whose excellent
Japanese has allowed him to enter the most prestigious university in the
Japanese empire. The magistrate cannot tell voiced from unvoiced con-
sonants (confusing ga, and ka, for example) and constantly mixes them
up, a common mistake among Japanese speakers whose mother tongue is
Korean. In other words, his Japanese is marked with traces of Koreanness.
Overbearing and anxious at the same time, the magistrate is nevertheless
speaking in Japanese about the colonial policy instituted in 1937 forbid-
ding Koreans from wearing their traditional white clothes on the grounds
that more time and water are required to launder them. Struggling to
keep up, “Noseblower” is stumbling often over translation to Korean. The
assembled villagers understand none of the foreign language coming
out of the magistrate’s mouth and are perhaps equally clueless about the
rationale behind the colonial policy even when the speech is rendered
into the language they understand. For all three parties in this farcical
scene — speaker, translator, and listeners— the Korean language ought to
have been a more e}ective medium of communication. Conveying a mes-
sage, however, is not the primary concern of anyone present.
What is at issue is that through translation Japanese is reconfirmed
as the language of authority. The magistrate reasons that the Korean
language cannot evince the dignity he, an o�cial of the Japanese empire,
deserves. In other words, he thinks that if he were to speak in Korean,
he could not command respect and obedience due him from his audi-
ence. Translation adds the final touch to the constant configuration of
the colonial hierarchy of languages. The majority of the colonized, who
are alienated from power, cannot access the authoritative voice directly
but hear it only through the mediation of translation. The magistrate’s
Japanese, which is less than fluent, nevertheless registers in the minds
of the villagers as the flawless language of authority, not least because
it has been translated. The villagers cannot tell the awkwardness of the
magistrate’s Japanese, which to Insik’s ears is less than standard Japanese,
the imagined ideal speech without which the idea of the homogeneity of
Japanese could not hold. The villagers know the speech is being delivered
in a foreign tongue not only because they do not understand it but also
because it requires translation to Korean. The language must be Japanese

4 / Introduction
because it is coming out of the mouth of the magistrate, the representa-
tive of Japanese colonial power. In sum, the magistrate wants to speak in
Japanese because it is the language of authority and the villagers know
his speech is being given in Japanese because it is being translated into
Korean and he is a colonial o�cial representing the empire of Japan.
Thus, the scene farcically marks language politics in colonial society and
translation’s collusion with it.
On the one hand, by showing in the case of Insik and his uncle that
linguistic boundaries do not always coincide with racial or ethnic bound-
aries between colonizer and colonized because the colonized can learn
the colonizer’s language, the story subverts, in a way, the unreflectively
immediate correlation between language and ethnicity embedded in
colonial discourse on literature and culture. In Chapter 3, I will further
discuss this issue of the often assumed correlation between language,
ethnicity, and literature when I examine the writings of the Korean intel-
lectual Ch’oe Chaesŏ. Kim Saryang’s story, on the other hand, reveals that
translation reifies linguistic boundaries between Japanese and Korean
and demarcates those who can speak Japanese from the rest who cannot.
Dependence on translation to communicate in the colonizers’ language
marks exclusion from power. Furthermore, in the story, language still
functions as a relatively stable demarcation to set apart the Japanese from
Koreans because the magistrate’s awkward Japanese testifies to his less-
than-complete mimicry of the colonizers.
Whereas translation’s collusion with colonial domination does not go
unnoticed in such literary works as “Deep Grass,” the colonizer’s uneasi-
ness toward translation recurs throughout colonial literature. Nakanishi
Ino suke’s 1922 story “Futei senjin” (Recalcitrant Korean) memorably
evokes from the perspective of a sympathetic Japanese intellectual the
sense of unease and frustration the colonizers feel at their dependence
on translation.6 As a matter of fact, the story can be read as an allegory
of colonial translation, or at least of one mode of colonial translation, and
thus the failure of translation in its most fundamental sense. It begins
with a Japanese man named Usui Eisaku traveling with his Korean trans-
lator to the far northwest region of Korea in the early 1920s. His destina-
tion is far from the urban areas that the Japanese keep under tight control.
Anti– Japanese guerilla activities persist around the region. The purpose
of the trip is to meet an old Korean man who is known to be one of the
leaders of anti– Japanese resistance. Usui hopes to have honest conversa-
tions with him and other Koreans with strong anti– Japanese sentiments
and to let them know that not all the Japanese support Japanese colonial

Introduction / 5
rule and that quite a few sympathize with Koreans’ demands for inde-
pendence. His wish is sincere, but he cannot deliver his thoughts to the
Koreans he meets without the help of a translator. His Korean translator,
whose name is not given in the story, does not seem to care about Usui’s
sincere wishes, but instead worries more than Usui about the Korean
insurgents, who do not hesitate to use violence for their cause.
The only protection available to Usui against the possible hostility of
the insurgents is a letter of introduction from his friend from college,
Hong Hŭigye, a socialist who had been the fiancé of the old man’s daugh-
ter, now deceased. The letter, written in Korean— which Usui does not
understand— is his sole protection. The old man has every reason to hate
Japan. Not only has his country lost its independence to Japan but his
daughter perished at the hands of Japanese forces during the March First
movement.7 Usui is understandably very nervous about meeting with
the old man. His nervousness arises primarily from the assumption that
these anti– Japanese Koreans will not discriminate between sympathetic
Japanese like Usui himself and the rest of the colonizers at whose hands
Koreans su}er. Usui can communicate with the colonized only through
translation, and his limitations in communication with Koreans intensi-
fies his nervousness. If he encounters hostility from the colonized, his
fate will rest on his translator, whose reliability is in question not because
of his Japanese abilities but because of his lack of commitment to Usui’s
cause. Usui is also distressed by the backwardness of the region so far
from the civilized urban center he came from. Even though he is decorous
enough not to say so in front of Koreans, he refers to them as “natives”
(dojin), a pejorative revealing his sense of superiority over the supposed
primitiveness of the indigenous people.
Getting o} the train that brought him to this dismal place isolated
from civilization, Usui looks around nervously. When he learns that the
train station manager is Japanese, he asks him how long it would take to
reach his destination on foot, speaking as clearly as he can to make sure
the manager will know from his speech that he is Japanese, too. Usui does
not need to ask the question because he knows the answer. He just wants
to speak with a Japanese person, sentimentally thinking that it will be his
last chance to talk to a fellow countryman until he returns. Concerned
about Usui’s safety, the manager recommends that he stay the night and
set out the next morning. Although grateful for the manger’s concern,
Usui decides to continue his trip at once, following the suggestion of his
translator, who urges him to depart as soon as possible so that they can
arrive at their destination before night falls. The Japanese station man-

6 / Introduction
ager stares ominously at the translator dressed in Korean clothes, which
unmistakably marks him as a Korean, but the translator ignores him. As
Usui leaves the train station, the lone post of modern civilization in the
middle of an untamed land, his anxiety mounts.
Usui’s encounter with a local is discouraging enough. The Korean
boatman refuses to take Usui across a river because he is Japanese. The
translator’s attempt at persuasion fails as Usui’s goodwill fails to trans-
late. Usui’s request to be ferried across is linguistically too simple to be
untranslatable and thus the failure of translation does not derive from
incommensurability between Korean and Japanese. Although the river
seems to symbolize linguistic, cultural, and emotional barriers between
the colonizer and the colonized, Usui’s helplessness in the face of the
boatman’s refusal hints at the vulnerability of the speaker with respect
to the addressee’s rejection and the misunderstanding to which the self
might be subject when engaging in conversation with the other with
whom the self shares no common ground. Does not such an occasion
of conversation between ultimately heterogeneous interlocutors call
for translation in its true sense, the translation necessitated by failure
of communication? Does not such genuine translation require the self ’s
commitment to conversation with the other despite the risk of being
ignored and misunderstood? Certainly, leaving his linguistic, cultural,
and emotional comfort zone, Usui is willing even to risk being harmed by
the colonized to have a talk with the insurgents. Refusing to give up, Usui
swims across the river. Impressed by Usui’s perseverance, the boatman
promises that he will take him back across the river when he returns.
Usui’s perseverance pays o}. To his surprise, the old man speaks Japa-
nese, although his Japanese is tainted with the peculiar Korean accent
and mispronunciations of Japanese words. Usui’s anxiety over the hos-
tility he expected from the old man subsides as he learns that not only
can the old man speak Japanese but also he receives his Japanese guest
with both generosity and dignity. Even when the old man is showing the
blood-stained clothes his daughter was wearing when she was killed, he
graciously struggles to hold his emotion in check so as not to upset his
Japanese guest too much. The old Korean and the young Japanese warm
to each other. Usui’s goodwill is finally transmitted to the old man and it
is thus translated. But who translates it? Is there any genuine translation
involved in the interactions between the old man and Usui? The Korean
host is courteous enough not to be too critical, and the Japanese guest is
willing to be critical enough of Japanese colonial rule. The reader might
momentarily forget that Usui was contemptuous of the backwardness

Introduction / 7
of Koreans in the region. The Korean and the Japanese understand each
other and they agree with each other. Neither miscommunication nor any
points of contention lie between them. They are in sync. No translation
is called for. Finding his services are not required, the translator retreats
into silence. Thus, the story is also about the erasure of translation.
As the story proceeds, it takes an unexpected turn. Having been well
treated with good food and drink, Usui retires to sleep in a room pro-
vided by the old man. Awakened in the middle of the night by a strange
sound, he sees a dark shadow entering and checking his possessions. The
shadow soon leaves, but Usui recognizes it as the old man. Usui starts
to suspect that the old man’s hospitality is a ruse to lure him into a trap.
He curses himself for naively believing that he can build solidarity with
Koreans by transcending di}erences in language, culture, and ethnicity.
His suspicion grows into paranoia and he concludes that, from the begin-
ning, his friend Hong has colluded with the old man to harm him. In the
end, it turns out that the old man is probably rummaging through Usui’s
possessions to find out if Usui is a spy from the Japanese police. The old
man is a known anti– Japanese activist and must be alert to any possible
police intrusion. Usui knew about the old man’s anti– Japanism from the
beginning, and that is exactly why he wanted to talk to him. Thus, Usui’s
commitment to a genuine encounter with the insurgent turns out to be
much more fragile than it first appeared.
When these mutual suspicions and misunderstandings arise, the
translator is clueless and helpless. He fails to interpret the old man’s real
intentions behind his suspicious actions or to mediate between the colo-
nizer and the colonized. He is as much scared and suspicious of the old
man as Usui is. He is a failure at his task as a translator, mistrusted by
the station manager in the beginning, found ine}ective in persuading the
boatman, and unnecessary for mediating between Usui and the old man.
Moreover, he fails to resolve misunderstandings between the two when
they need his intervention most. It is Usui himself who later realizes that
he misunderstood the old man’s stealthy visit while the translator is still
debating whether to escape from the old man’s house. Thus, the story
pivots on the failure of translator and translation.
What does the ultimate failure of translation in the story reveal about
the colonizer’s anxiety over translation? Why is the translator mistrusted
and translation obviated in the story? Why is translation erased at the
moment when the insurgent anti– Japanese Korean and the sympathetic
colonizer Usui open their hearts to each other? As argued below, I sus-
pect that the anxiety of colonizers over translation relates to the idea of

8 / Introduction
translation as a supplementary mediation between the addresser and
addressee. In the ideal situation of transparent communication, the
addresser and the addressee speak the same language. The presence of
a translator hints at the impossibility of transparent communication and
exposes the uncertainty of the univocal signification of the addressor’s
authorial voice. To execute colonial power over the mundane lives of
the colonized, the colonizer has to rely on language to convey thoughts,
intentions, and orders to the colonized. However, most of the colonized
cannot understand the colonizer’s language. Thus, translation is called
for at the service of colonial rule. Nevertheless, the need for translation
reminds the colonizer of his vulnerable dependence on translation for
communication with the colonized. As discussed below in more detail,
translation highlights the materiality of language because it centers on
di}erences between languages. That materiality frustrates the trans-
parent signification of the colonizer’s authorial voice, the voice of the
authoritarian regime of colonial rule. In short, in the mindset of the colo-
nizer, the need for translation suggests that despite the intricate network
of military and administrative apparatuses at his service, his authorial
voice is still vulnerable to the misunderstandings and refusals of under-
standing by the colonized in the course of signification and translation.
In that sense, the erasure of translation in the story “Recalcitrant Korean”
resonates with the colonizer’s desire to reclaim his absolute authority
over transparent communication and reconfirm his authorial voice. The
colonizer’s desire dictates that his voice should be heard and understood
without adulteration. From that perspective, translation inevitably fails
because it cannot help but adulterate the authorial voice in the process of
translation.
The story brilliantly shows that even a sympathetic Japanese like
Usui is still entrapped in such authorial and authoritarian subjectivity
of the colonizer. Usui does not desire to encounter the other who refuses
to understand his good will. In other words, Usui fears translation as
an occasion in which the self faces the other, who might challenge the
univocal signification of the self ’s authorial voice. Thus, the translator is
mistrusted, and translation obviated. The thankless job of a translator is
taken up by a nameless Korean in the story.8
In principle, a colonial translator need not be from the colonized. A
colonizer can be a translator if he or she is proficient enough in the lan-
guage of the colonized. As a matter of fact, as the first chapter of this
book shows, the translation of Korean historical and literary classics
into Japanese by Japanese translators simultaneously shaped and con-

Introduction / 9
firmed the ways in which Koreans and Korean culture were represented.
Nevertheless, there are virtually no depictions of Japanese figures who
translate between Japanese and Korean in colonial literature.
The lack of bilingual Japanese figures in colonial literary texts reflects
a colonial reality in which Japanese was privileged not only by the
colonizers but increasingly also by the colonized themselves, a point I
will discuss further in Chapter 5. Whereas, as seen in the case of Hosoi
Hajime, the main focus of Chapter 1, quite a few Japanese Korea experts
engaged in textual translation (pŏnyŏk in Korean/hon’yaku in Japanese),
it was Koreans who were relegated as colonial functionaries/translators
to the task of verbal translation (t’ongyŏk/ tsūyaku) for mundane matters.
The dearth of Japanese functionaries/translators is also inferred from
the following quote from a column published in the newspaper for the
Japanese colonial police in Korea.9 The column’s author laments the lack
of enthusiasm among Japanese colonial o�cials to learn Korean.
Officials are not interested in Korean language study, and accord-
ingly they cannot do their work without translators as some argue
that there is no need for learning Korean because Korean children
have been taught Japanese at elementary school for the last twenty
years. This is a precondition for taking the first wrong step in ruling
Korea.10
Although indicating that there were few Japanese functionaries/transla-
tors in colonial Korea, the quote also begs further questions about trans-
lation and, its implication in and resistance to colonial domination. The
author of the column does not suggest that Japanese colonial bureaucrats
should learn Korean to replace Korean translators. Instead, he urges that
Japanese colonial bureaucrats should do their work without translators.
What does this dismissal of translators tell us about? Why does the
author not see that the realization of his suggestion for Korean language
study will eradicate neither translation nor translators but only turn
Japanese colonial bureaucrats themselves into translators, who translate
between Japanese and Korean? Does this rejection of translation and
translators not echo the uneasiness of the colonizers about translation
as revealed in the literary texts examined above? From where does this
desire to eradicate translation come?
A clue to a rather prosaic answer can be gleaned from the above dis-
cussion on Nakajima’s story “Landscape with Policeman: A Sketch of
1923.” Korean functionaries/translators are suspected of either sabotag-
ing or muddling communication between the colonizers and the colo-

10 / Introduction
nized. Unlike the Korean functionary/translator, the bilingual Japanese
bureaucrat does not mediate between the colonizers and the colonized.
He himself is a colonizer. Above all, is it not obvious that he represents
no one other than his own authorial voice? Such reasoning, however, does
not exhaust colonial translation, which flows in both directions between
the languages of the colonizer and the colonized. Not only would the
bilingual Japanese bureaucrat still have to translate for his fellow colo-
nizers from Japanese to Korean but, more important, he would also have
to render Korean-language texts both textual and verbal into Japanese.
It is necessary to push the discussion further to take it as a point of
departure for rigorously examining translation and its relationship to
colonial domination. The conventional understanding of translation,
which Roman Jakobson designated as translation proper, posits that
translation is above all a linguistic practice of rendering an authorial voice
ex pressed in one language into another, whether the voice is inscribed in
a written text or enunciated verbally by a speaker. What makes transla-
tion distinct from other linguistic practices is the interval between the
language in which the authorial voice is originally expressed and the
language to which it is transferred. In essence, then, there is no di}er-
ence between textual translation (pŏnyŏk/honyaku) and verbal transla-
tion (tongyŏk/tsūyaku). In the course of translation, the authorial voice
is fixed onto a meaning in a di}erent language, which has its own sets of
semantic and syntactic patterns and rhetorical modes. Without the dif-
ference between languages translation intends to transcend, translation
is not distinguishable from interpretation or rewording, which Jakobson
called intralingual translation because of its a�nity to translation.11
The cognate relationship between translation and interpretation turns
attention to another interval, which inheres not only in translation but
also in any act of reading and listening, the interval between the autho-
rial voice and its signification. The authorial voice cannot present itself
instantly and transparently because it materializes only through lan-
guage and because that very materiality compromises the spirit of the
voice. In other words, to be addressed to the other, the authorial voice
needs to first be transformed into a series of sounds or letters. Even in the
case of monologue, the voice cannot materialize outside of language. Put
di}erently, the voice comes only as a sign that supposedly corresponds to
its meaning. However, as long as the voice can be expressed only as a sign,
it does not remain univocally tied to a fixed meaning. As Jacques Derrida
elucidated, signs are invested with meanings that can be expressed only
by other signs.12 If meanings are generated through the relationship

Introduction / 11
between signs and the authorial voice comes only as a sign to be signi-
fied, then there is always slippage between the authorial voice and its
signification. Unlike in the case of interpretation or rewording within one
language, the authorial voice is initially expressed in one language and
its signification is eventually enacted in another in the course of transla-
tion. Because of di}erences between languages, the interval between the
authorial voice and its signification is much more pronounced in the case
of translation than that of interpretation or rewording.
The authorial voice exceeds the limits of what Derrida called voice,
which is supposed to be the pure medium of interior monologue immedi-
ately and transparently present in the consciousness of the subject.13 As
Derrida demonstrated in his critical interpretation of Edmund Husserl,
desire for the presence of transparent and immediate meanings figures in
the voice, the idea of the pure medium of interior monologue. Although
the authorial voice is already contaminated by references to the exter-
nal world, the solipsistic voice is silent, prior to utterance, and insulated
within the solipsistic interiority of the subject. Only in the instance of
solitary speech is a perfect match between a signifier and a signified pos-
sible. Such an absolutely clear signification within the subject’s interior-
ity, however, communicates nothing to the other because an immediate
and transparent meaning present to the subject’s consciousness is not
transmissible to the other, who is external to the interior sel�ood of the
subject. In other words, any attempt to engage with the other accompa-
nies the adulteration of the subject’s solipsistic voice.
With the above exposition of translation in mind, let us return to the
Japanese colonial police newspaper column in which the author does not
acknowledge that what he recommends Japanese colonial bureaucrats do
is translation. As suggested above, despite the desire for the erasure of
translation manifested in the column, the Japanese bilingual bureaucrat
could not break free from the position of a translator. His work would
inevitably entail rendering Korean texts, both textual and verbal, into
Japanese. In such a case, he would obviously be engaging in translation
in its common sense meaning. Then, what about the other way around
in linguistic transactions? Is he translating when speaking or writing to
the colonized in Korean? The question is deceptively simple. Is it not too
obvious that he is speaking rather than translating when enunciating
in Korean? Put di}erently, unlike in the case of translation in the usual
sense, both the authorial voice and its signification coincide in the same
person when the Japanese colonial bureaucrat is speaking or writing in
Korean. Thus, it appears that the answer to the question should be nega-

12 / Introduction
tive: The Japanese bureaucrat’s linguistic practice of speaking or writing
in Korean fails to qualify as translation.
The seemingly simple question merits further examination, however,
because it pertains to understanding the desire for the erasure of transla-
tion revealed in colonial discourse. In a situation in which a Japanese
writer fluent in Korean is rephrasing his own Japanese-language work in
Korean, the consciousness of the subject splits into the speaker (or writer)
and the interpreter even though it is the same subject who has written
the work in Japanese and is rephrasing it in Korean. To be more exact,
the consciousness of the subject is punctuated with the split into one who
wrote the original work and the other who is interpreting it, and the two
are distanced or spaced in the Derridean sense by time. This split is all
the more pronounced because of the presence of the text, the work, which
is being rendered in a di}erent language.
Does this split of the subject not inhere in the Japanese bureaucrat’s
speech in Korean? As discussed above, the work in which the authorial
voice of the past is inscribed marks the interval between the speak-
ing and translating subjects within the same person. Because there is
no visible work of the authorial voice from the past in the case of the
Japanese bureaucrat speaking Korean, the split of the subject is likely to
go unnoticed.
To make the point more concretely, suppose that the interval between
the authorial voice inscribed in the work and its interpretation enacted
in translation is progressively narrowing and converging to such a point
that the voice is almost simultaneously signified in a foreign language
as soon as it is presented to the subject’s consciousness. No matter how
miniscule this interval may be, because it implies the split of the subject,
it cannot be eradicated completely because the authorial voice material-
izes only as a sign and an interval necessarily remains between the voice
and its signification even when the subject is speaking to himself. The
split of the subject inheres in any enunciation, whether it is speaking or
translating. The materiality of language constantly frustrates its imme-
diate and transparent signification. Because the materiality of language
is spotlighted by di}erences between two languages in the course of
translation, the act of translation accentuates such a split of the subject,
which often goes unnoticed in monolingual practices.
Translation is a paramount instance in which the subject encounters
the other from within as well as without. As examined above, demand
for translation presupposes an other who does not share any common
ground with the self for understanding. At the same time, translation

Introduction / 13
highlights the split of the subject, which hardly comes to light when
the self speaks its native tongue, supposedly under its total command.
Does the desire to erase translation glimpsed from colonial discourse not
amount to a yearning for transparent communication and fear of fac-
ing the split of the subject, then? Because the presence of the translator
brings to attention the impossibility of the self ’s control over the other in
conversation, and translation calls the putative unity of the subject into
question, translation can be said to undermine the epistemological and
ontological foundation of an individual colonizer’s subjectivity, which is
often uncritically extended to the national subjectivity of colonizers.
As discussed earlier, however, the collusion between colonialism and
translation depicted in the Korean and Japanese literary texts suggests that
translation as conventionally understood can also reconfirm the ethnic and
linguistic identity of the enunciating subject by reifying the boundaries
of the languages between which translation is taking place. The Japanese
poet, critic, and early Tolstoy translator Kitahara Hakushū’s preface to
the Korean translator Kim Soun’s 1929 Japanese-language anthology of
Korean folk songs Chōsen Minyoshū (Collection of Korean Folk Songs)
illustrates the ways in which the concept of translation works simultane-
ously to denaturalize and reconfirm the unified subjectivity of the indi-
vidual as well as national self.14 In the earlier part of the preface, Kitahara
Hakushū in e}ect deconstructs the unified subjectivity of the Japanese by
historicizing its emergence. However, his deconstructive move dissipates
into oblivion as his discussion on translation proceeds with an e}ort to
recover the unity of the Japanese national subjectivity in the end.
As discussed further in Chapter 4, during the colonial period, Kim
actively introduced Korean literature and culture to Japan through trans-
lation. The success of his Korean folk song anthology earned him promi-
nence as the most authoritative Japanese-language translator of Korean
literature and enabled him to go on to translate and publish modern
Korean poetry. This anthology is still in print 80 years after its initial
publication.
Kitahara Hakushū begins his preface with a memory of Korea when he
was a child in his hometown of Yanagawa, which is in Fukuoka prefecture
on the island of Kyūshū, the part of Japan closest to Korea. Children in
his hometown used to call Korea “Kara,” a name that conjures up a sense
of intimacy and nostalgia (shitashiku natsukashimareta) for him. From
time immemorial, even in the era when Japan was “closed,” the region
had close trade and cultural relations with Korea. Village fishermen often
sailed to the shores of the Korean peninsula to fish and Korea appeared

14 / Introduction
often in the village elders’ stories. Some of the fishermen fathered mixed-
blood children with Korean women and their wives burned with jeal-
ousy. Kitahara Hakushū’s memory of the virility of the men from his
village, which could function as a metaphor for Japan’s colonial expan-
sion, ironically leads him to realize that the culture of his home region
has descended from miscegenation between the cultures of ancient Japan,
Korea, China, the South Pacific islands, and the Netherlands, which had a
trading base in nearby Nagasaki during the Tokugawa period.
Kitahara Hakushū’s recognition of the cultural miscegenation of his
home re gion makes him di}erentiate the collective identity of his people,
whom he addresses as the first person plural “we,” from the national subjec-
tivity of Japan. He goes on to point out that even though both the Tōhoku
region of northern Honshū and his home region supposedly belong to the
same country, Japan, the Tōhoku region was more alien than Korea to
people in his home region who were brought up with their regional folk-
tales and language deriving from the mixture of such di}erent foreign
cultures. Hakushū historicizes the process of the unification of Japanese
culture by observing that Japanese folk songs and children’s songs tran-
scending regional limits gradually emerged only after the implementa-
tion of the “alternate attendance” policy of the Edo period and the ensuing
expansion of trade between distant regions during the Tokugawa period.15
What catches our attention in Hakushū’s discussion is the double-
edged function of “translation” in his discussion, simultaneously denatu-
ralizing and reconfirming the putative unity of Japan. Hakushū percep-
tively argues that Japanese folk songs and children’s songs are actually
translations of regional songs. Because the folk songs would not have
been understandable to people from other regions if people had continued
singing them only in their regional dialects, the songs were translated
into standard Japanese. From this observation, Hakushū inferred that the
putative unity of Japanese culture was constructed not least through the
process of translation of regional di}erences as variations of one uniform
people and culture. Although Hakushū did not go into detail about how
the unified subjectivity of the Japanese behind this translation process
might arise, the Japanese national subjectivity and the idea of homoge-
neous national culture emerged, as many Japan historians have pointed
out, only after the new Meiji government had implemented educational,
economical, and political institutions to integrate various social and local
segments into the unified consciousness of the Japanese in the process of
building a modern nation state in Japan in the late 19th century.16
In his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, the Japanese critic

Introduction / 15
Karatani Kōjin insightfully points out that Japanese writers’ translation
and internalization of Western literary works made a decisive impact on
the formation of modern Japanese literature. His examples are Futabatei
Shimei’s translations of Ivan Turgenev and Mori Ogai’s translations of a
variety of European literary works.17 In contrast to such “external transla-
tion” from Western culture and literature, Hakushū is calling attention
to the importance of “internal translation” from various localities within
Japan in the construction of modern Japanese culture. Needless to say, it
became feasible to make a clear distinction between “external” and “inter-
nal” only after translation drew boundaries between the unified space
designated as Japanese culture and others outside.
By calling attention to the aspect of translation that violently renders
regional di}erences as mere variations of one uniform culture, Hakushū
inspires the reader to glimpse traces of regional di}erences that had been
suppressed through translation in the process of constructing a homo-
geneous national culture. However, Hakushū’s discussion suddenly
re verses course and proceeds with his reconfirmation of the unified
national subjectivity of the Japanese. In this case, too, it is the notion of
translation that enables him to postulate the unity of Japanese subjectiv-
ity. Even though the culture of Hakushū’s home region became integrated
into the unified Japanese culture only through the process of transla-
tion, Hakushū argues that, because people in his home region are also
Japanese, it was not impossible for them to internalize the Japanese spirit
and tradition, which seeped into written language as well as lyrics of the
songs from other regions. It seems as if he believes the unified Japanese
subjectivity preceded the construction of homogeneous Japanese national
culture through translation. Hakushū’s reasoning is, of course, circular
because it suggests that the preexisting homogeneity of the Japanese had
laid down the foundation on which the homogeneous Japanese subjectiv-
ity was built through the construction of homogeneous national culture.
In Hakushū’s ensuing discussion, however, the idea of a unified Japa-
nese culture registers most clearly in contrast to Korean culture. Hakushū
sees Kim’s translation of Korean folk songs into Japanese as a commend-
able feat bridging a much wider gap in language and national character
than the translation of regional folk songs into standard Japanese and
their dissemination to other regions of Japan. Here, when Hakushū refers
to a linguistic practice transcending a gulf between Korea and Japan,
translation is ironically understood to reify boundaries between Japanese
and Korean cultures and languages. In contrast to the case of translating
regional cultures within Japan into standard Japanese where the practice

16 / Introduction
of translation suppresses di}erence, the act of translating Korean folk
songs into Japanese plays up the di}erence between two nations. Accord-
ing to Hakushū, the lyrics of the Korean folk songs tend to be more acer-
bic, cynical, and melancholy because they developed from “the particular
domestic situation of Korea.” The implication is that because the Korean
people were misruled by an incompetent and despotic ruling class, they
tended to express anger, cynicism, and sorrow in their folk songs. In
Hakushū’s view, Chinese influence was also so strong over the formality
and vocabulary of Korean folk songs that it had a negative e}ect on them.
Despite his emphasis on the di}erence between Japanese and Korean
folk songs that ensures the homogeneity of Japanese culture in contrast
to Korean culture, Hakushū’s profuse praise of Kim’s translation betrays
his uneasiness toward the lack of di}erence he expected to find in the
Japanese translations of Korean folk songs. In Hakushū’s eyes, Kim’s ex –
pert translation made Korean folk songs too “Japanese.” Kim’s mastery
of Japanese poetic sensitivity and diction was to such a degree that his
translations evoke uncanny feelings of repulsion. Here again can be seen
Hakushū’s forced maneuver at reconfirming the homogeneity of the
language and culture enclosed within Japan. As noted above, Hakushū
asserted in the beginning of his preface that people in his home region
in Kyūshū felt closer to Korea than to such distant regions within Japan
as Tōhoku. As cultures of di}erent regions within Japan were integrated
into Japanese national culture through translation, Korean culture grew
alien even to people like Hakushū, who had previously felt close to Korea.
Hakushū, however, seems to have entirely forgotten the supposed inti-
macy with Korea of which he reminisced. Through Kim’s skillful trans-
lation, Korean folk songs, part of now defamiliarized Korean culture,
return as something uncannily similar to Japanese folk songs and eerily
familiar to Hakushū.
As Hakushū himself recognizes earlier in the preface, the defamil-
iarization of Korean culture to people in Hakushū’s home region at least
came as much from the homogenization of culture in Japan since the
Tokugawa period and especially since the Meiji Restoration as from the
deteriorating domestic situation in Korea or from Chinese influence over
Korean culture. When Hakushū treats Japanese culture as a unified body
of social practices particular to Japan and distinct from those in Korea,
his perspective has already shifted from the one rooted in his regional
identity to one based in the Japanese national subjectivity. As can be
seen in his anxiety over the lack of expected di}erence in Kim’s Japanese
translations of Korean folk songs, the unified body of Japanese culture

Introduction / 17
and the Japanese national subjectivity can be posited only in contrast to
Japan’s other, whether it is the West or its colonies like Korea. Instead of
critically contemplating his anxiety, Hakushū holds up Kim’s mastery
of Japanese vocabulary and poetic diction to reprimand contemporary
Japanese poets for their indi}erence to Japanese literary tradition as they
rush to imitate the Western poetic style. Thus, Hakushū ends up recon-
firming the homogeneity of Japanese culture and language supposedly
inscribed in Japanese literary tradition.
What eventually undermines Hakushū’s initial insight into the frag-
mented nature of national subjectivity is the fact that, for him, the dif-
ference of the other the self encounters in translation is not absolute.
As seen above, translation for Hakushū is the site where di}erence is
either suppressed, as in the case of the regional folk songs translated into
standard Japanese, or stressed, as in the case of the Korean folk songs
translated into Japanese. The di}erence Hakushū recognized in both
cases is appropriated to posit the self-sameness of the Japanese and that
of Koreans.
As the Korean poet Kim Suyŏng, who is the focus of Chapter 5, shows,
translation can also be a site at which the self-sameness of national sub-
jectivity is brought into question because an act of translation continu-
ously pushes the translator to doubt whether he or she can master the
mother tongue, let alone the foreign target language, an anxiety over
the very underpinnings of a sense of belonging to linguistic, national,
and cultural communities. In short, translation can be an occasion in
which the self encounters the otherness of its own mother tongue. The
self ’s encounter with the otherness of its native language can constitute
a first step toward an ethically and politically arduous position for criti-
cal reflection on the self ’s relationship with its own language, culture,
ethnicity, and country. As I argue to varying degrees throughout this
book, particularly in Chapters 2 and 5, such a self-reflective position is
ethical and political because it can eventually open up an alternative way
of associating with others who are presently excluded from communities
defined by their sameness.

18
1. Translation and the
Community of Love
Hosoi Hajime and Translating Korea
In the preface of his 1924 anthology Chōsen Bungaku Kessakushū (Col-
lection of Korean Literary Masterpieces), the Japanese editor and transla-
tor Hosoi Hajime explained the importance of his Japanese translation
projects of classical Korean literary works by recalling a resolution he
made at the time of the March First Independence Movement five years
earlier. According to his recollection, when he heard the disturbing news
about Koreans uprising against Japanese rule in the colony, Hosoi had
the epiphany that his mission in life would be to bring Japan and Korea
together into genuine unity, and that to achieve that unity, the Japanese
(naichijin, or the people of Japan proper) needed to understand (rikaisuru)
Korea (Chōsen). In Hosoi’s view, understanding Korea meant knowing
completely both the merits and the faults of the Korean people.1
Hosoi warned his readers that it would do no good for the Japanese to
dwell on Koreans’ defects without respecting them for their strengths and
empathizing (dōjōsuru) with them for their weaknesses. Hosoi went on
to advise readers that there is no better way to understand the mind of a
nation (kokka minzoku) than knowing its literature because, he reasoned,
the best of human feelings (ninjō) is “distilled” and “crystallized” into
literature.2 Hosoi contended, furthermore, that literature helps not only
comprehend the zeitgeist (seishin) of the period when it is written but
also helps to trace the origins of the national character (kokumin seikaku).
What stands out in Hosoi’s preface is the priority he gives to litera-
ture and to language in interpellating “the Japanese” and “the Koreans” as
colonizer and colonized. Korean literature is prioritized as the cultural
repository in which the national character of the colonized is manifested,
whereas the Japanese language is privileged as the marker of the colo-
nizer in that those Hosoi is addressing as the Japanese are distinguished

Translation and the Community of Love / 19
as speakers of vernacular Japanese. Certainly, it is nothing new to see a
body of literature written in a vernacular language as belonging to that
language community, which, in many cases, is understood to coincide
with a nation. Nor is it unheard of to regard such national literature as
the locus in which national character is manifested. For example, Hosoi’s
assumption resonates with 18th- and 19th-century European romanticist
discourse on culture and nation that privileged literature and language as
the culmination of culture and the manifestation of national spirit. The
view that each nation has a unique literary tradition first emerged in 18th-
century Europe.3 Since then, the idea of national literature has prevailed
and is echoed by such commonsensical expressions as American litera-
ture and Irish literature. In Japan, such pioneering works on Japanese
literary history as Nihon Bungakushi (History of Japanese Literature) of
1890 a�rmed the phonocentrism inherent in the valorization of vernac-
ular language by privileging Japanese phonetic language over Chinese
script as the essential element of Japanese national literature. Mikami
Sanji and Takatsu Kuwasaburō, the authors of Nihon Bungakushi, further
harnessed literature to national character by defining “national literature”
(kokubungaku) as the literature that possesses the “essential qualities
inherent in each country” (hōkoku ni yorite sono koyū no tokushitsu).4
Despite its banality, Hosoi’s view on the national character of the colo-
nized and their literature merits attention precisely because such banal-
ity testifies to the generic mode of colonial discourse in which di}erences
between the colonized and the colonizer are laid out. Colonial discourse
abounds with emphases on cultural di}erences between the colonized
and the colonizer, but, ultimately, the di}erence of the colonized always
serves to explain their supposed inferiority. Japanese colonial discourse
on Korea was no exception. When flipping through the pages of Japanese
publications on Korea during the colonial period (1910– 1945), one can
easily find descriptions of backward customs and degenerate national
character attributed to Korean culture.
Even though I use such expressions as “Korean culture” and “Japanese
representation of Korean culture” in this book, I do not believe that there
exists a genuine national culture as such prior to representation. The
way in which a social practice is “nationalized” and thus associated with
Japanese culture or Korean culture is already ideological. As discussed
below, such national identities as Korean and Japanese are schematized to
exist in their own right only through the intricate and incessant mecha-
nism of identification that operates in legal, educational, and other social
institutions. Needless to say, “ideological” in this context should not be

20 / Translation and the Community of Love
taken to mean false or fallacious. As Louis Althusser points out, “ideol-
ogy” refers to the representation of social relations that is indispensable
in the construction of subjectivity.5
Hosoi was one of the most active Korea experts in Japan during the early
years of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Hosoi was born on February 10,
1886, in Fukuoka. He and his sister moved to Tokyo after the death of
their parents. Hosoi then entered a vocational school to study radio com-
munications, where he became alerted to labor issues for the first time.
In the fall of 1906, Hosoi became a reporter for Nagasaki Shinpō, a news-
paper based in Nagasaki near his birthplace in Kyūshū. He organized a
socialist study group, which was disbanded, however, by the authorities
soon after, and he was forced to resign from his newspaper job. Branded
a socialist, Hosoi could not find work and so, partly for this reason, he
went to Korea in 1908, looking for employment. He was working as a
journalist in Korea when the country was annexed by Japan and, in 1911,
he cofounded the Chōsen Kenkyūkai (Association for Research on Korea)
with Kikuchi Kenjō and Ōmura Tomonojō. Returning to Tokyo later that
same year, he went to work for the prestigious Japanese newspaper Tōkyō
Asahi Shinbun (Tokyo Asahi Newspaper). Hosoi founded a journal called
Rōdō to Kokka (Labor and the State) and called for cooperation between
workers and capitalists. After the March First movement in 1919, he went
back to Korea and worked there as a journalist, with financial support
from Saito Minoru, the governor general in Korea at that time. After the
Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, Hosoi set out on a lecture tour around
Japan addressing the Japan– Korea relationship and, around the same
time, he also began advocating Pan-Asianism in earnest through publica-
tion and public speeches.6
By the time his Collection of Korean Literary Masterpieces was pub-
lished in 1924, Hosoi had already spent 17 years introducing classi-
cal Korean literature, history, and culture to Japanese readers through
translation and publication.7 The list of Hosoi’s publications is exten-
sive and includes not only translations of classical Korean writings but
also such original works as his 1911 Chōsen Bunka Shiron (Treatise on
the History of Korean Culture) and his 1921 Senman no Keiei: Chōsen
Mondai no Konpon Kaiketsu (Administrating Korea and Manchuria: The
Fundamental Solution to the Korean Problem).
Despite his entreaties that the Japanese should recognize both the
merits and shortcomings of Koreans, Hosoi’s texts brim with negative
descriptions of Korean national character that serve to explain why Korea

Translation and the Community of Love / 21
deserved to be colonized. When read side by side with the treatises on
nation, culture, and literature by Korean intellectuals of his day, Hosoi’s
texts are helpful for bettering our understanding of the Korean discourse
of cultural nationalism that developed in the 1910s and 1920s primarily
in response to the negative portrayals of Korean culture by the Japanese.
The assumptions about national character on which Hosoi based his
arguments were shared by both Japanese and Korean intellectuals of the
time. The colonized intellectuals responded in one of two ways: They
either refuted the colonizers’ negative characterization of their nation by
glorifying their history and culture or they appropriated the grammar
and terminology of colonial discourse on the inferiority of their nation
to make a case for building a modern Korean national culture to replace
their failing tradition. In any case, as examined in the discussion below
about a treatise on Korean literature by Hosoi’s contemporary, An Hwak,
Korean nationalist intellectuals also subscribed to the belief that the
national character of a people existed in a verifiable way and that their
national literature reflected the spirit of the nation.
At the same time Hosoi justified Japan’s colonization of Korea on
the basis of di}erence, he also earnestly called for harmony between
Japan and Korea and saw his translation projects as e}orts to bridge
the gap between the two peoples by facilitating Japanese understanding
of Korean national character and culture. Although advocating a more
benevolent policy toward Koreans and denouncing heavy-handed mea-
sures taken by the Japanese colonial government, Hosoi insisted that
the di}erence between the colonized and the colonizer necessitated an
unequal relationship. In Hosoi’s view, Japan as the big brother should not
hesitate to chastise Korea when necessary to guide it to the right path.
At the same time, Hosoi wanted to build a genuine community of both
the Japanese and Koreans through mutual understanding, which would
complement and stabilize the political unity of Japan and Korea brought
about by colonization. Love (ai) was the principle Hosoi came up with to
realize simultaneously his hope to bring harmony to the colonizer and
the colonized and his desire to maintain a rigid hierarchy in the relation-
ship between the two.
This chapter treats Hosoi’s writings on Korea with a focus on his
concepts of national character, literature, translation, and love. First, I
examine the ways in which translation as both a linguistic practice and a
trope enabled Hosoi to schematize the national character of the colonized
and the colonizer. As mentioned above, Hosoi construed his translation
projects of Korean writings as an e}ort to foster Japanese understanding

22 / Translation and the Community of Love
of Korean national character and culture. It is interesting to note, how-
ever, that Hosoi simultaneously revealed his distrust of translation as
“unreflective imitation” and “copying” inferior to the original. Despite the
seeming contradiction, both his high regard and mistrust were derived
from the conventional view of translation as representation of an original.
By examining Hosoi’s texts on national character and literature in
relation to the Korean nationalist intellectual An Hwak’s treatise on the
same topics from the same period, in this chapter I also show how the
collective subjectivities of the colonized and the colonizer are simultane-
ously asserted and schematized as they are associated with traits of each
nation. I pay special attention to the familiar argument found in both
Japanese and Korean discourse that the literature of a people reflects its
collective spirit, its national character.
Finally, drawing on G. W. F. Hegel, I parse Hosoi’s demand for both
the Japanese and Koreans to love one another to realize their unity.
In later works on family, civil society, and the state, Hegel shifted his
focus from love to the importance of law as the principal underpinning
of communal bonds because he realized that love alone cannot keep a
community united. However, even in his 1821 Elements of the Philosophy
of Right, Hegel upheld love as the basis of the family. Reading Hosoi
with Hegel is helpful in understanding why Hosoi chose to allegorize
the unity between Japan and Korea as a familial one in his treatises on
Japanese colonial rule over Korea, emphasizing the importance of love
in the colonizer’s relationship with the colonized. Because love can work
as the principal bond only within a family, as Hegel realized, Hosoi’s
insistence on love as the primary bond between Koreans and the Japanese
could hold only if the political community of the Japanese empire was
imagined as a family.
The colonizer’s emphasis on benevolent a}ections in the relationship
with the colonized is not unique to the particular historical moment of
Japanese colonial domination in Korea, however. As lucidly expressed
in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” Western
colonialism has also been justified as the manifestation of the colonizer’s
benevolence and a}ection for the colonized. By reading Hosoi’s treatises
on Japanese colonial rule over Korea through the lens of Hegel’s ideas
of love, family, and community, it is possible to see an a�nity between
Hosoi’s emphasis on love and the general tendency of modern colonial
discourse that insists on the colonizer’s benevolence and a}ection for
the colonized. Hosoi’s concept of love ultimately failed to bind Japan and
Korea together, however, despite his hope that it would overcome the

Translation and the Community of Love / 23
di}erence between the colonized and the colonizers in language, culture,
and ethnicity. To the contrary, as discussed below, his insistence on love
only revealed that the community of the colonizers itself was already
fractured.
tr ansl ating national ch ar acter
Hosoi’s first major work was his 1911 Japanese-language survey of Korean
cultural history and literature. Chōsen Bunka Shiron (Treatise on the
History of Korean Culture) appeared in the new colony only a year after
annexation. Although the title suggests that it delves into various aspects
of Korean culture in history, it focuses mainly on what is today usually
called classical Korean literature, providing not only a chronological out-
line of representative literary, political, and religious works of premodern
Korea but also biographical information about prominent writers who rep-
resent each period, many of whom were Buddhist monks and Confucian
literati.8
The book was the first of its kind in Japanese, if not in any language. In
the preface, Hosoi confessed that, when writing the book, he balked many
times at the sheer amount of primary materials stored in Kyujanggak, the
royal library of the Chosŏn dynasty. While admitting that his study was
far from perfect, he expressed “a modest wish” that it would lay the foun-
dation for further study on Korean literature and religion.9 The Treatise
on the History of Korean Culture was quickly adopted by the prominent
Japanese scholars Yoshida Tōgo and Tomizu Hirondo as a textbook at
Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University, respectively.10
In the beginning of the preface of The Treatise on the History of Korean
Culture, Hosoi remarks that one cannot help agreeing that “two thou-
sand years of Korean history” has reached its miserable conclusion. He
goes on to write that “if we (warera) were placed in the position of a third
party without any relation to the Korean nation (Chōsen minzoku), we
could a}ord just to heave a sad sigh over its pitiful end as if reciting an
elegy about it.” He reminded his readers that “since Japan and Korea have
merged into a family, and twelve million people of the Korean nation
have become the infant children (sekishi) of His Sacred Majesty (seijō)
and brothers of the Japanese, the Japanese should guide them onto the
right path to assimilation (dōwasuru).”11
Hosoi seems almost to lament that he cannot a}ord to yield to his sen-
timentality and leisurely write a sad poem over the tragic ending of the
Korean nation instead of writing a bulky book on the history of Korean

24 / Translation and the Community of Love
culture, but the “we” he references has a pressing reason to act to achieve
the colonial project of assimilation. Hosoi worries that assimilation will
take time, maybe as long as hundred years, because of the “pitiful” Korean
national character he finds manifested in Korean history. He argues that
“Korean politics changed as capriciously as a prostitute’s heart, its litera-
ture was nothing but imitation and failed to develop any originality, and
its religion remains limited only to superstition.”12 In short, just as the lack
of principles characterized Korean politics prior to colonization, Hosoi
judged its culture as lacking originality. Hosoi observes that because the
ruling yangban class of Confucian literati despised fiction and theater as
the expression of vulgar emotions, those literary genres existed mostly
by and for the lower classes, and most works in those genres were written
in the vernacular Korean script. Many of them emerged first as transla-
tions of such famous Chinese works as Xīyóujì (Journey to the West) and
Sānguó yănyì (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).13
Japanese colonial discourse on Korean culture often centered on
the argument that throughout history Koreans had slavishly imitated
Chinese civilization. For Hosoi, however, Koreans could not even copy
Chinese civilization correctly. He argued that they missed the essence
of Confucianism and only clung to its fossilized formalities. Neo-
Confucianism (Chujahak in Korean/Shushigaku in Japanese) flourished
briefly during the late Koryŏ dynasty (918– 1392), but it ossified into the
ideological support for a cruel regime during the Chosŏn period, in which
warring factions of the ruling class meticulously cited passages from the
Confucian canon about rules of propriety and ceremony to denounce their
political enemies. Political rivalries often escalated into ruthless purges
and persecutions, taking a heavy toll on the nation, he concluded. Hosoi
also harps on the toadyism of Koreans and traces this perceived tendency
to worship the powerful to the time of the unification of the three ancient
kingdoms by Silla in the seventh century. The Chosŏn dynasty’s loyalty
to Ming China exemplified the extremes of such a tendency. Hosoi goes
on to argue that both the ruler and his o�cials had held on to toadyism,
obeying the powerful country (that is, China) abroad while oppressing
their own people at home. Hosoi argues that the Korean people submit-
ted to such tyrannical rule and turned to superstitious religious practices
as a means of escape from su}ering and privation.14 In contrast to his
relentless criticism of the Korean ruling class, Hosoi showed sympathy
toward ordinary Koreans, who, in his view, had been victimized by the
oppressive rule of the yangban elite.15 Nevertheless, in the end, Hosoi did
not spare any Koreans, oppressed or oppressor, from his generalizations

Translation and the Community of Love / 25
of Korean national character. He reasoned that the instability of their
society was what made Koreans “shady and scheming, and obsequious
and obdurate.”16
Thus, Hosoi asserts that Koreans are doomed to failure and empha-
sizes that twelve million Koreans truly deserve “our” sympathy. To
rescue Koreans from their dismal fate, Hosoi concludes that the “we”
(the Japanese) need to educate them with noble ideals.17 The “we” as an
advanced nation should embrace these Koreans in the newly annexed
land and come in peace as “a companion and teacher.”18 To achieve this
goal, Hosoi reminds his readers, his study is intended to trace the geneal-
ogy of Koreans’ thinking and analyze their culture. Hosoi asserts that to
understand sentiments and customs of a nation, it is essential to examine
its native literature (sono kuni koyū no bungaku) because human emo-
tions distilled into literature, which not only captures its zeitgeist but
also controls and cultivates the nation’s character throughout history.19
The way Hosoi asserts a strong correlation between national literature
and character suggests that he took the validity of this strong correlation
for granted. To fully grasp his view on national character and literature, it
is necessary to read his essay “Kosho Kobun o Tsujite Mitaru Chōsenjin no
Shinsei” (The Korean Mind Seen Through Its History and Literature), which
appeared a decade later, in 1921, in Chōsen (Korea), the Japanese-language
journal published by the government general in colonial Korea.20 In this
article, Hosoi explains how national character takes shape throughout his-
tory and how it is reflected in literature. According to Hosoi, just as an
individual has a personality, a nation has a national character that reflects
the totality of its people’s personalities and constitutes the national spirit
that determines the rise and fall of that nation. Citing the French racial
theorist Gustave Le Bon, Hosoi states that the personality of an individual
is shaped not only by upbringing, formal education, and socialization but
also by genetically inherited physiological and mental characteristics.
These genetic characteristics are not determined within a generation but
developed and inherited from one generation to another. Thus, tying his
thought on national character to a pseudobiological theory, Hosoi con-
cludes that because a people inherits its ancestors’ acquired physiological
and mental characteristics, individuals are inseparably connected not only
to their parents but also to the entirety of their ancestors and ultimately
their race (shūzoku). In short, for Hosoi, the national character is shaped
by what the nation has inherited from its ancestors, and individuals are
not isolated beings but rather exist to pass the collective characteristics of
their ancestors on to their descendents.21

26 / Translation and the Community of Love
Hosoi goes on to argue that experiences of trial and error throughout
history are what add up to culture, which in turn informs and condi-
tions the people’s knowledge and patterns of behavior. In other words,
for Hosoi, not only does generational inheritance explain how an indi-
vidual is connected to his or her “genus,” in other words, the nation, but
generational inheritance also explains how the ethos a nation acquires
at one point in history is passed down from one generation to the next
and is deposited in the nation’s culture. Thus, a pseudoscientific theory of
race was fused with culturalism in Hosoi’s reasoning. Hosoi was clearly
influenced by Social Darwinism, which gained wide currency among
East Asian intellectuals during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
and provided a “scientific” framework to normalize competition between
nations and to justify patriotism and imperial expansion. Needless to say,
this fusion of racial theory and culturalism was not unique to Hosoi.22
For Hosoi, surveying Korean writings of the past enabled his Japanese
readers to see how transparently the texts exhibited Koreans’ negative
national character. In other words, the inevitable decline of the Korean
nation was retrospectively confirmed by this Korean historical and lit-
erary canon. For example, drawing on such texts as Pyŏngjailgi (The
Records of the Namhan Castle in 1636) and Mongminsimsŏ (Admoni-
tions on Governing the People), Hosoi recounted how a Korean o�cial
deserted his post to selfishly save his own father as the invading Qing
army was advancing and showed how corrupt provincial magistrates
during the Chosŏn period exploited the people beyond imagination.23 In
Hosoi’s account, those were telling signs of Koreans’ abominable national
character.
Hosoi did not find his evidence of Korean character only in nonfic-
tion documents, however. As mentioned earlier, he considered Korean
literature no more than imitations of the Chinese originals. He deemed
such Korean adaptations of Chinese stories to be low-quality romantic
fiction, which provokes either “sensual stimuli” or “a long sigh of resent-
ment.” Hosoi reasoned that because the literature of commoners ought
to express their thoughts and emotions and that the Korean people had
su}ered from oppressive rule, one might expect that Korean literature
would produce works on a par with the Japanese kabuki play about the
Edo-period street tough Banzuiin Chōbei whose story, in Hosoi’s judg-
ment, expresses the indignation and hopes of Japan’s common people.24
He did mention Hong Kildong chŏn (Story of Hong Kildong) in which the
eponymous hero leads a band of bandits and punishes corrupt o�cials

Translation and the Community of Love / 27
and monks. He ultimately dismissed the tale, however, as just “deriva-
tive of Nezumikozō.”25 The fact that the Korean tale preceded the famous
early 19th-century Japanese thief by more than two hundred years did
not restrain him from making such a sweeping dismissal. In his view,
Korean literature was worthy of attention only as indisputable evidence
for Koreans’ lack of originality and creativity
In Hosoi’s essay “The Korean Mind Seen Through Its History and
Literature,” as in colonial discourse in general, the colonized can be
known only through di}erence from the colonizer. To embrace the colo-
nized, the colonizer must understand how the colonized is di}erent and
how this di}erence results from their respective national characters. The
historical experience of the colonized shapes their culture and national
character, which is reflected in their literature and history, and trans-
lating the colonized’s historical and literary writings is instrumental in
fostering the colonizer’s understanding of the colonized on both levels
of cognitive and empathetic capacities. In other words, the assumption
behind Hosoi’s translation projects was that reading the history and lit-
erature of the colonized through translation enabled the colonizer to both
know about and empathize with the colonized. Needless to say, Hosoi had
no doubt that the colonizer’s empathy should and would be reciprocated
by the colonized in the end. Thus, for Hosoi, translation was central to
forming a genuine community of the Japanese and Koreans, which would
complement and stabilize the political unity between the two peoples.
It is noteworthy, however, that, in spite of his commitment to his
translation projects, Hosoi also slighted translation as an unworthy act
of copying parasitically dependant on the original. Hosoi’s disdain for
translation can be glimpsed when he dismissed Korean literature as the
adaptation of Chinese literature and proof of Koreans’ lack of original-
ity. Even though Hosoi used adaptation (hon’an) instead of translation
(hon’yaku) in “Korean Mind Seen Through Its History and Literature,”
he understood adaptation as resulting from a lack of originality. Fur-
thermore, he also used translation to indicate unreflective imitation of
the original in other places. When, for example, Hosoi was criticizing
Japan’s failure to win over Koreans in his policy recommendation to the
Japanese government, he denounced early Japanese colonial policy as
a verbatim translation of a Western model that did not fit the case of
Japanese colonialism in Korea.26 Moreover, he reasoned that Koreans had
resented the reform policies foisted by Japan on the Korean government
before annexation because they were a translation of Japanese law that

28 / Translation and the Community of Love
did not take traditional Korean customs into account.27 He also dismissed
socialist and other radical strands in the Korean independence movement
as mere translations of Western ideas.28 Here was Hosoi’s conundrum:
While assuming that his translations of Korean classics would render
Korean national character transparently into Japanese for Japanese read-
ers, he was suspicious of translation as a slavish copying of the original.
Hosoi’s high regard for translation as the path to understanding the
national character of Koreans did not necessarily conflict with his disre-
gard for translation as copying of the original, however, because both his
high regard and his suspicion were derived from the idea of translation
as representation of the original. In Hosoi’s view, Japanese translations
of classical literature could convey the meanings of the texts because
they represented the original. However, so long as a translation merely
represents an original, it never exceeds it. Not only does a translation
fail to go beyond its original but also it is inevitably inferior to it because
it is a parasitically dependant copy of it. In Hosoi’s eyes, the new colo-
nial situation in Korea required a new original policy, not a copy of the
Western colonial policy. In a similar vein, he denounced the radical ideas
embraced by Koreans because as copies of Western radical ideas, they did
not fit Korean society.
korean appropr i ations of national ch ar acter:
an hwa k’s “korean liter ature”
As mentioned earlier, Hosoi’s view on literature and national charac-
ter was not unique. Not only Japanese but also Korean intellectuals of
Hosoi’s time shared the view of literature as a mirror of national char-
acter. When juxtaposed with Korean nationalist discourse on Korean
national character and literature, Hosoi’s arguments are even more
instructive for understanding the rise of the cultural nationalism of the
colonized in response to the colonizer’s representation of their culture. In
response to the colonizers’ negative characterization of their nation, the
colonized intellectuals either attempted to disprove it by glorifying their
own history and culture or they rejected their own traditional culture
by ascribing to it the blame for their nation’s decline. In either case, they
appropriated the grammar and vocabulary of Japanese colonial discourse
on the Korean national character found in Hosoi’s writings.
An Hwak’s 1915 essay “Chosŏn ŭi Munhak” (The Literature of Korea)
is a good example of a Korean nationalist response to the Japanese char-
acterization of Korean culture and literature.29 One of the pioneering

Translation and the Community of Love / 29
nationalist intellectuals, An (1886– 1946) devoted his life to studies in
a wide range of fields including literature, language, history, music, fine
art, and martial art. He is credited with writing the first book-length
Korean-language study on Korean literary history, Chosŏn Munhaksa
(History of Korean Literature), published in 1922, 11 years after Hosoi’s
Treatise on the History of Korean Culture.
“The Literature of Korea” was one of the earliest conscious attempts
to define literature (munhak) in Korea. In the essay, An defines literature
as writing expressive of aesthetic sentiment. He further argued that lit-
erature impresses the human spirit and presents its ideals.30 Like Hosoi,
An deems the literature of a nation to be the mirror of that nation’s
culture and, echoing Hosoi, he asserts that, to examine the civilization
(munmyŏng) of a people (inmin), it is more fruitful to survey the rise and
fall of that nation’s literature than changes in the political arena because
literature rules the internal feelings of the people whereas politics govern
the external world. However, for An, literature does not only passively
represent the national character and culture. It can also actively remedy
the ills of the nation. He thus goes beyond Hosoi by implying that the
task of national literature is to revive the ideals of the nation and lead to
reform in its politics.
An’s evaluation of the Korean literary tradition certainly sets him
apart from Hosoi. In contrast to Hosoi, who dismissed Korean literature
as a mere copy of Chinese literature, An stresses the di}erence between
Korea and China. Even though he acknowledges that Korean literature
was under Chinese influence, he insists that it is no parasitic copy of
Chinese literature. He points out that Koreans had developed distinct
conventions of writing in classical Chinese and stresses that even the
Korean literature written in classical Chinese had retained a unique style
di}erent from that of Chinese literature. He pointed out that Koreans
had also invented their own Chinese-character compound words such
as singsing (fresh), p’aekjŏng (butcher), chŏmshim (lunch), and kaekchu
(broker).
An based his positive evaluation of Korean literary tradition on his
idiosyncratic observation that literature is inherently pessimistic to a cer-
tain degree. For him, literature not only seeks ideals but also simultane-
ously yearns for liberation even from such ideals. Thus, An declares, the
pessimism inherent in literature stems from these opposing desires, and
he goes on to argue that traditional Korean poetry was more advanced
than its European counterpart because it had expressed this pessimism
for hundreds of years, whereas European literature veered toward pes-

30 / Translation and the Community of Love
simism only during the 19th century, after years of chaos during which
“Hellenic” and “Hebrew” thought had tangled.31
An admits, however, that Korean literature failed to develop on a par
with modern European literature and blames that failure on Chinese
influence.32 In his eyes, having been entrapped in Confucianism for four
thousand years, Chinese literature demonstrated only a superficial intel-
lect and imagination as it harped on a banal morality of praising good
and denouncing evil.33 Taking his argument a step further by criticizing
Confucianism itself, An holds Confucianism responsible for the decline
of the Korean nation. In his view, then, because Confucianism cherished
tradition and rejected progress, it finally turned into lifeless, fatalistic
conservatism. Furthermore, An argues, by fastidiously insisting on
correct manners and rituals and ruthlessly persecuting heretical views,
Confucianism incited factionalism (sasaek tangjaeng).34
An calls for the construction of a new literature to replace the tradi-
tional literature that was written in classical Chinese and under Confu-
cian influence.35 He worries, however, that the construction of a new lit-
erature is not an easy task to accomplish because Koreans are malleable,
unreflectively a}ected by foreign influences. In his view, then, Korean
history testifies that Koreans were gullibly swayed by such foreign influ-
ences as Buddhism and Confucianism and quick to forfeit their native
spirit. More specifically, An expresses concern that Korean writers might
be too willing to follow the lead of European literature in constructing a
new literature.
An’s concerns about the putative malleability of Koreans eerily echo
Hosoi’s characterization of them as lacking originality and slavishly imi-
tating Chinese civilization. An warns that if Korean writers and poets
only imitated foreign literature marveling at new trends, as their prede-
cessors had done Confucianism and Buddhism, the unique character of
Korea would perish.36 He expresses concern that the defects in foreign
nations that were reflected in their literatures might rub o} on Korean
writers and poets, who would then transmit them into Korean literature.
Drawing on French literature, one might become lured into its defects
of frivolity and anarchistic tendency. Studying Spanish literature,
one might become inclined to selfishness and isolationism. Admiring
the ethos (kip’ung) of the English and Germans, one might become
infected by their arrogance. Attempting to test Americans’ fairness,
one might experience their treachery. Taking a peek at the Russian
character (t’ŭksŏng), one might be surprised by their debauchery and
lack of focus. Praising the sensitivity of the island people (Japanese),

Translation and the Community of Love / 31
one might mimic their deviousness and cruelty and feel dizzy about
their pessimistic idea of nature.37
An concludes his essay with a Social Darwinist view, calling for the con-
struction of new Korean literature as a contribution to the revival of the
Korean nation. In An’s view, races (injong) and nations (minjok) were in
competition (kyŏngjaeng) that was taking place primarily in the realm
of politics. On the other hand, he emphasizes that it is also competition
between the character of one nation and that of another. Because each
nation drew on its own national character (minjoksŏng/ minzokusei) in
competition with others, An reasons that the result of such competition
comes down to how to succeed in the dissemination of native thought and
the appropriation of foreign ideas. Literature is one realm in which this
can happen, and An urges anyone with a hand in literature to contribute
to building a new literature.
Where Hosoi treated Korean literature as only a cultural repository
that made the defective national character of Koreans manifested, An
em phasized the establishment of a new Korean literature that would
contribute to the revival of the Korean nation in the future. Thus, where
Hosoi dwelled on historical and literary works of Korea, looking back
to the past, An called for the construction of the new literature of Korea
and looked forward to the future. Despite the di}erence, however, An’s
essay is typical of how Korean nationalist responses to Japanese colonial
discourse shared significant assumptions with it. For both Hosoi and An,
literature existed only as particular national literatures reflective of each
nation’s collective character. Although they di}ered on their positions
on Japan’s colonization of Korea, they were also in agreement that the
Korean nation was easily swayed by foreign influence.
the communit y of lov e
Continuing political disturbances in Japan and Korea in the decades fol-
lowing the publication of his literary history diverted the main focus
of Hosoi’s activities from publishing translations of dusty old books to
writing policy suggestions in the face of pressing realities in the colony.
The first such political disturbance was the March First movement in
Korea, a series of mass demonstrations that broke out and spread across
the colony in March 1919. The Japanese colonial authorities heavy hand-
edly suppressed the Korean protests, and thousands of protesters were
imprisoned, wounded, or killed. The event prompted Hosoi to write

32 / Translation and the Community of Love
Administrating Korea and Manchuria, blaming Japan for its failure to
earn Korean consent to colonial rule by criticizing the cruelty of Japanese
settlers toward Koreans and the forced imposition of Japanese laws and
institutions on Korean society.38
In this pamphlet, Hosoi blames the poor performance and oppressive
nature of Japanese rule in Korea on Japanese national character, iden-
tifying three characteristics of the Japanese nation that were proving
obstacles to Japan’s success in the colony. First, the Japanese tend to be
aggressive and wrest others’ possessions away from them. Wakō (piracy)
in the 16th century was, according to Hosoi, one notable example of such
a national tendency in history. Second, the Japanese tend to be insular,
a tendency exacerbated during the Tokugawa period when Japan closed
itself to other countries. Third, since the opening of the country to the
West, the Japanese had grown to idolize the West.39 In Hosoi’s judg-
ment, Japan’s success or failure in its colonial rule in Korea depended on
whether it could overcome the shortcomings in its own national character
as well as whether it could understand Koreans and their culture.
The great Kantō earthquake in 1923 and the massacre of Korean immi-
grants in its aftermath pushed Hosoi to reformulate his idea of benevo-
lent colonialism further.40 Since his 1911 Treatise on the History of Korean
Culture, he had emphasized the importance of Japanese understanding
of the Korean national character and culture that he had launched his
translation projects to foster. Understanding in this context refers both to
cognitive capacity, which produces knowledge, and to emotive capacity,
which engenders empathy. In earlier writings, Hosoi assumed a seamless
connection between the two, but after witnessing Koreans’ continuing
resistance to Japanese rule and Japanese brutality and oppression against
Koreans, he realized that his stress on the importance of knowledge of
the colonized’s culture was not enough to lead the Japanese to embrace
Koreans as their compatriots and get Koreans to reciprocate Japanese
“good will.” He recognized that intellect and emotions are not necessarily
unified in understanding in a dialectical fashion. Hosoi set out to under-
line the importance of feelings vis-à-vis intellect because he realized that
only when the colonizer went beyond the cognitive level and reached
the emotive level of understanding would he embrace the colonized and
overcome the di}erences in language, culture, and history. What Hosoi
came up with to enable the necessary leap from intellect to feelings was
love.41 For him, love entails knowing and empathizing with the other.
Love is, in that sense, a higher form of knowledge, a dialectical subli-
mation of intellect and feelings. Love incorporates di}erence between

Translation and the Community of Love / 33
self and other only to transcend it and eventually bind them in genuine
community. In other words, Hosoi envisioned that, although love would
not immediately eradicate di}erence between Japan and Korea, it would
eventually lead the two peoples to become one as love transcends di}er-
ence. Through love, the self and the other would merge into one, as “we.”
After the earthquake, Hosoi began in earnest to call for mutual sup-
port and love between the Japanese and Koreans. For example, in a short
essay published immediately after the earthquake, “Naisenjin Ketsugō no
Kitan” (Beginning of Union Between the Japanese and Koreans), Hosoi
blames a lack of mutual support and love for the disappointing perfor-
mance of Japanese colonial rule in Korea.42 When Korean youths resorted
to “nihilistic violence” or “civil disobedience” in protest against Japanese
rule and showed their obliviousness to their own responsibility for the
decay of their nation, the Japanese responded to the protests with oppres-
sive measures. Hosoi laments that there was no sign of harmony and
reconciliation between the two peoples and that this hatred and confron-
tation can only lead to mutual annihilation.
In the terrible destruction by the earthquake and the ensuing massa-
cre of Koreans, however, Hosoi saw a ray of hope. He reported that some
Japanese had risked their lives to help Koreans in the face of threats from
vigilante groups. For Hosoi, these commendable Japanese personified
such ideal characteristics of the Japanese nation as sympathy, benevo-
lence, and courage. He did not refer back to the negative aspects of the
Japanese national character he had denounced in Administrating Korea
and Manchuria. After the earthquake, for Hosoi, what was at issue was
not so much casting o} the Japanese negative national traits as reclaim-
ing the ideal characteristics of the nation, which not many Japanese held
to anymore, unfortunately. In his 1925 book Chōsen Mondai no Kisū (The
Destiny of the Korean Problem), Hosoi equated the much-heralded spirit
of Japan (Yamato damashi) and the way of the warrior (bushidō) with
this virtue of mutual support and love.43 As proof, he presented what
he termed as the first principle of bushidō, that the samurai should pos-
sess sensitivity to the fleeting nature of things (mono no aware), an aes-
thetic value much touted in Japanese nativist discourse. Hosoi argued
that if a person possessed this sensitivity to nature, he would surely be
considerate and thoughtful and willing to help others with love. Thus,
Hosoi’s circular reasoning was that genuine Japanese national charac-
ter is marked by the virtue of mutual support and love because it is the
national character of the Japanese manifested in the spirit of Japan and
the way of the warrior. In this manner, he sought to construct a Japanese

34 / Translation and the Community of Love
subjectivity to support the colonial mission of assimilating the colonized
while avoiding excessive violence.44 This does not mean that the genuine
identity of the Japanese nation preceded the construction of the Japanese
subjectivity as a colonizer. National identity is, of course, never static.
It exists only through ongoing processes of individual self-identification
with the nation and, in this sense, coincides temporally with mechanisms
operating in spheres ranging from culture to law that interpellate an
individual as a national subject. Although status as a subject of a state
is instrumental in forming identity, national identity cannot be reduced
to that status alone, as shown by the example of the Korean “imperial
subjects” within the Japanese empire.
Hosoi’s texts on national character show the ways in which such
identification operates. As examined above, Hosoi continually identi-
fied certain traits as Japanese and others as Korean national character.
In other words, the Japanese as well as Korean nations were schematized
as tangible and self-evident entities. Furthermore, in Hosoi’s texts, the
interpellation of “we, the Japanese” as benevolent colonizers bore on the
construction of Japanese national subjectivity and, needless to say, par-
alleled the construction of Korean subjectivity as a helpless colonized
nation.
In “Beginning of Union Between the Japanese and Koreans,” the afore-
mentioned essay Hosoi wrote immediately after the great Kantō earth-
quake and ensuing massacre of Koreans, he advises Koreans to give up
their hopes for independence and urges the Japanese to return to their
ideal national character. He argued that however much Koreans try to
achieve independence, Japan will not allow it to happen. Hosoi recom-
mends instead that Koreans develop their society by training technicians,
improving their living standards, and, above all, acquiring a national
character as well as individual personalities suitable to the modern world.
To refute Korean demands for independence, Hosoi allegorizes the rela-
tionship between Korea and Japan in a parable of a woman and her savior
and patron. Before annexation, Korea was like an old woman who could
not survive on her own. Through annexation, she was transformed into
a newborn baby and now, 13 years later, is like a 13-year-old girl. Hosoi
likens Koreans’ yearning for independence to a 13-year-old girl’s demands
for the freedom to love (ren’ai) the man of her choice. Just as a sensible
parent would not let an adolescent girl choose who is right for her, Hosoi
argued, Japan cannot allow Koreans to decide what they want to do. 45
It is noteworthy that although Hosoi feminized Korea, he did not por-
tray Japan as her male lover. Thus his story went against a convention

Translation and the Community of Love / 35
of colonial romance that represents the colonizer and the colonized as a
man and a woman in love. Furthermore, Hosoi seems to have consciously
preempted a possible allegorization of the Japan– Korea relationship as an
amorous one. His allegory of Japan as a patriarch who volunteers to res-
cue and protect a feminized Korea as an adopted family member makes it
clear that the two are not in a conjugal relation because the woman Korea
is either too old or too young. This model of an adoptive family reflected
Hosoi’s desire to create love and at the same time maintain hierarchy in
the relationship between the Japanese and Koreans. I will return to this
allegory later to explain Hosoi’s idea of love through Hegel’s discussion
of love, family, and the state.
A way of placing Hosoi’s concept of love in the context of his overall
colonial project is o}ered by the text of a speech that was published in
1926 in the Japanese-language journal of Chōsen Shakaijigyōkai (Korean
Social Work Association), a quasi-governmental social work organization
supervised by the colonial government. As the title “Gojosōai no Taigi to
Chōsen Mondai” (The Great Significance of Mutual Support and Love,
and the Korean Problem) suggests, the speech o}ered a sustained argu-
ment for mutual support and love as the key to the success of Japanese
colonial rule in Korea.46 The article deserves attention not only because
it gives a succinct outline of Hosoi’s thought and highlights his idea of
absolute love but also because it is a reminder of Hosoi’s importance as a
propagandist for Japanese colonialism. In 1924 alone, he gave more than
250 public lectures about Korea in Japan and southern Korea, attended by
a total of 128,000 people.47
Hosoi began his speech by reflecting on the aftermath of the great
Kantō earthquake. According to Hosoi, more people died of hunger in its
aftermath than from the earthquake itself, and there were even cases of
mothers strangling their babies to protect them from starving to death:
Without loving support, even a person who survived an earthquake and
ensuing fires might die anyway. Survival depends on the mercy of those
who distribute food and shelter after a disaster. Hosoi then promoted
mutual support and love as the foundational principle of genuine com-
munity while at the same time denouncing the individualistic tenden-
cies he found prevalent in Japan, prioritizing individual freedom over
the unity of the community. For Hosoi, the individual is connected to
the community both diachronically and synchronically. The individual’s
existence results from that individual’s own ancestors, thus making filial
piety one form of the mutual support and love on which the commu-
nity is based. Furthermore, genuine love for one’s own self should not be

36 / Translation and the Community of Love
averse to mutual love. One should cultivate personality so that love for
oneself does not conflict with love in the community. According to Hosoi,
converging in harmony at the heart of the communal spirit are love for
oneself, filial piety, and loyalty to the state.
Hosoi then illustrated how his concerns about Japanese national char-
acter were connected to his vision of mutual support and love between
the Japanese and Koreans. As national character is the sum of individual
personalities, the individual represents the nation. The way a Japanese
person interacts with a Korean, for example, a}ects the ways in which
Koreans understand the Japanese nation as a whole. One individual’s
good deeds are more e}ective at bringing Japanese and Koreans together
than a political slogan like “harmony between Japanese and Koreans.”
Koreans would see the Japanese national character in such an individual
deed and judge whether the Japanese would be trustworthy as the older
brother to whom they could turn in a time of di�culty.48
Hosoi admitted, however, that in contrast to quite a few commendable
Japanese individuals who dutifully fulfilled their colonial moral impera-
tive as benevolent colonizers, there were a number of Japanese who failed
to live up to the ideal national character of Japan. He reported that while
traveling in Korea he had himself witnessed a telling incident. He was in
a bus going from Pusan to Tongnae in the southeastern part of the coun-
try when the bus had to stop because an oxcart was blocking a narrow
country road. The Japanese bus driver got o} and punched the Korean
ox driver on the cheek. Appalled by the sudden violent act, Hosoi asked
the bus driver why he hit the Korean, and the driver angrily retorted,
“These days gooks (yobo) won’t listen if you’re a nice guy.” Hosoi implored
the Japanese to realize that Japanese “imprudence and indiscretion”
(seikyūtanryo) and “arrogance and inconsiderateness” (gōmanmushiryo)
provoked Korean violence.49
Despite numerous discouraging incidents like the one with the bus
driver, Hosoi did not abandon his hope for harmony between the Japa-
nese and Koreans. The basis of his hope rested on occasions in which
good intentions were ultimately understood by the other no matter how
impossible it might seem at first glance. He asserted “individuals from two
belligerent countries can meet heart to heart, and foreigners who do not
speak my language nevertheless can understand me.”50 For Hosoi, even
when the other and the self do not speak the same language, the good
intentions of the self can and should be conveyed to and reciprocated by
the other without the mediation of translation. Hosoi went on to say that
even a dog and its master can understand each other when the master is

Translation and the Community of Love / 37
a}ectionately patting the dog on the head. Hosoi asked, then, how could
Koreans not understand the Japanese if the Japanese embraced them as
their younger brothers? Although he initiated his translation projects to
help the Japanese understand Koreans and their culture, he argued that
genuine understanding would transcend language without the mediation
of translation. In other words, for Hosoi, genuine understanding between
the self and the other would render translation unnecessary.
Even though his reasoning bordered on racism and fell right into
overbearing paternalism, Hosoi nevertheless called on the Japanese to
reflect on their attitude toward Koreans because Koreans’ hatred of the
Japanese would persist as long as the Japanese treated Koreans in unjust
and heavy-handed ways. Hosoi’s idea of love, however, did not rest on
equality between Japanese and Koreans. He believed that the Japanese
should be like an elder brother to Koreans, whose culture and society
lagged behind, and should lead them to become equals with the Japanese
themselves in the future. In that sense, Hosoi’s ideal community of the
Japanese and Koreans would not be based on solidarity among equals
but rather modeled after patriarchy or hierarchical fraternity between
siblings.
To further persuade his fellow Japanese to “love” Koreans despite
such troubling moral defects of the latter’s national character as laziness,
deceptiveness, and vainglory, Hosoi historicized these moral defects.
According to Hosoi, Koreans su}ered unprecedented oppression under
the rule of the yangban elite during the Chosŏn period. If the Japanese
had likewise been under such oppressive rule for so long, they, too, would
have developed moral defects. Koreans were made lazy. Since corrupt
o�cials took away wealth that people worked hard to accumulate, they
lost the desire to work. Over-taxation was another example of the ruling
elite’s abuse of power. There were cases in which the military levies were
imposed even on dead men and unborn children. Koreans had to resort
to deception to survive such heavy taxation and corrupt bureaucracy.
They never had any government help to address their grievances. The
powerful always won in court no matter how horrible were wrongs they
did. Koreans su}ered in a world without love, hope, and support. Because
they had never been loved, they tended to behave conceitedly once some-
one showed them a bit of a}ection. If treated with genuine love, “they
would open their hearts and respect, trust, and thank the person as if he
were a god (kami no kotoku).”51 Thus, for love to be the remedy to mend
the fissure between the colonizer and the colonized, the colonizer’s love
should be returned by the colonized. Hosoi did not and could not allow

38 / Translation and the Community of Love
the colonizer’s love to go unrequited because his idea of love as the prin-
cipal communal bond would crumble if he saw that the colonized might
not reciprocate the colonizer’s love. The colonized should do exactly as
the colonizer expected them to. In other words, Hosoi’s colonial moral
imperative could not acknowledge the alterity of the colonized.
Another aporia haunting Hosoi’s text is that his call for love failed
to recognize the fragmentation inherent in any kind of community. His
argument for love between the colonized and colonizer assumed uni-
formity in the communities of the colonized and colonizers because he
called for love not between individuals but between the collectivities of
colonizer and colonized. According to his colonial moral imperative of
love, Japanese should love Koreans not as individuals but as members of
an ethnic community. The love Hosoi called for does not exist between
people as singular human beings. It transpires only between members
of one ethnic group and those of the other. In other words, Hosoi’s
love presupposed the uniformity of each ethnic group whom he urged
to love each other. In Hosoi’s arguments, it was national character that
produces uniformity in each ethnic community. Contrary to his inten-
tions, however, his text reveals that the community of the Japanese was
already fractured. In the essay, Hosoi admits that despite Japan’s true
national character, there were a number of Japanese who lacked the spirit
of mutual support and love: arrogant colonial settlers who harassed
Koreans, unscrupulous businessmen who exported substandard com-
modities, thus ruining the reputation of Japanese goods abroad,52 and
selfish refugees who perished on a burning bridge after the great Kantō
earthquake because they refused to yield to those heading in the opposite
direction.53 For Hosoi, love was required not only to bind the Japanese
and Koreans, but also to recover unity among the Japanese whose own
community had disintegrated because of materialism and selfishness. In
other words, not only did Hosoi’s text constantly di}erentiate between
colonizer and colonized even though he was calling for the ultimate
assimilation of the latter into the former, it also inadvertently exposed
the absence of a unified community of the colonizer.
reading hosoi’s insistence on lov e
through hegel’s accounts of family
To fully appreciate the issues at stake, it is necessary to do more than
merely trace aporias in Hosoi’s texts. As mentioned above, from the

Translation and the Community of Love / 39
beginning of his career as a Korea expert, Hosoi worked to foster Japa-
nese understanding of Korea, and his e}orts were shown in his transla-
tion projects. Understanding in this sense meant both knowledge about
and empathy toward Korea. As he saw Koreans’ hatred of Japan persist
and Japanese contempt for Korea go on unchanged, Hosoi realized that
knowledge about the colonized and their culture did not necessarily lead
to empathetic feelings toward them. Especially after the great Kantō
earthquake, this realization led him to underline the importance of senti-
ment, as seen in his emphasis on love.
Hosoi’s emphasis on sentiment is found especially in his criticism of
the Japanese colonial authorities’ blind reliance on law. One of the most
serious problems for Japanese rule in Korea was, in Hosoi’s view, the fail-
ure of Japanese colonial bureaucrats to take account of di}erence between
the Japanese and Koreans. Colonial bureaucrats tried to give Koreans
what they deemed to be desirable without considering the di}erences in
customs, tradition, and language between the two peoples. Koreans could
not become Japanese overnight even though Japan implemented reform
policies through its colonial administration. Needless to say, Hosoi did
not advocate autonomy for the colonized. In his view, the Koreans did not
know what they needed. Instead, he argued that even with perfect law
and impeccable theory, the colonizer would still fail at governing another
people if he ignored the aspect of “human emotion” (ningen no kangeki).54
It was still the colonizer’s responsibility to provide for the needs of the
colonized.
At this juncture, I want to interject Hegel’s account of love, law, family,
and community to further grasp Hosoi’s argument. I make this argu-
ment because Hosoi’s prioritization of love over law echoes the criticism
of Kantian ethics Hegel developed in his early writings on Christianity.
In his 1799 essay “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” Hegel deemed
love the essence of Christianity and aligned Kantian ethics with his
depiction of Judaism, which, in his view, erroneously privileged law over
love.55 Viewing Immanuel Kant’s moral imperative as a heartless univer-
sal law dictated by an intellect cold to human feelings, Hegel upheld love
as the ultimate principle establishing unity between intellect and emo-
tion, which Kantian philosophy had kept separate. Not only did Hegel
view love as a higher form of knowledge unifying intellect and emotion,
but he also regarded it as the principle of communal unity in which the
self and the other are sublated into a “we” through which competing indi-
vidual desires and duties are overcome. Hosoi’s notion of love parallels

40 / Translation and the Community of Love
Hegel’s views in that it also underpins harmony between knowledge and
empathy in understanding and constitutes the foundation of a genuine
community between the Japanese and Koreans.
As if preemptively warning against rash attempts at building secular
communities like society and state on the principle of love, Hegel declared
that communities of love could survive only in isolation from the secu-
lar world in which individual desires and duties inevitably clash and are
never reconciled through love alone. That is why Jesus told his disciples
to retreat from “the profane world” and leave their families behind.56
Hegel suggested that it is no longer tenable to retreat from this world to
build a community of love. The ethics of love is too lofty to be relevant
to communities in this world. It cannot e}ectively bind people who do
not share the same faith. As a community expands beyond a small group
of believers, the communal bond based on love diminishes.57 In later
writings, Hegel declared that love is no longer an attribute of the state
by asserting, “There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content
must be rational, and I must know it.”58 There is little room for love as the
principal communal bond in the state in which the law is what binds the
people together. This is exactly why such secular ideologies as national-
ism and patriotism require quasi-religious elements to ensure that the
nation and the state are represented as sacred communities deserving of
reverence and demonstrations of love. In other words, the quasi-religious
aspects of nationalism and patriotism compensate for the lack of the com-
munal bond of love in the secular communities of a nation and the state.
The problem of love as the principle of communal unity can be summed
up in the following question: What if the other does not reciprocate the
love o}ered by the self? The self cannot force the other to reciprocate its
love because love is the opposite of dominance. Because love does not
tolerate dominance, it presupposes a nonviolent relationship. The prob-
lem of love hinted at by Hegel points to one pitfall in Hosoi’s conviction
that the colonizer’s love must be reciprocated by the colonized in the end.
Hosoi’s call for love does not allow the colonized the right to refuse to
reciprocate the colonizer’s love.
As his thought developed, Hegel further shifted his focus from love
to mutual recognition as the basis for ethics, but he did not renounce
love entirely. Instead he assigned it to the family as the basic unit of
community, which, in his view, provides the foundation for the high-
est level of community: the state.59 At the core of the Hegelian family
are the husband and the wife, whose conjugal relationship constitutes
a union between two independent individuals based on love. Each feels

Translation and the Community of Love / 41
incomplete alone and becomes complete only in union with the other. The
service of particular need of an individual “is transformed, along with the
selfishness of desire, into care and acquisition for a communal purpose,
i.e. into an ethical quality.”60 The marriage partners voluntarily surrender
their independent personalities to the conjugal union.61 Love involving
this gentle mutual recognition is in stark contrast to the violent struggle
between the self and the other for recognition delineated by Hegel in
his famous master– slave trope.62 Furthermore, Hegel dissociated mar-
riage from the contractual relationship that Kant considered necessary to
ensure equality between the conjugal partners because Hegel believed it
leads to objectification of human beings.63 From Hegel’s perspective, by
degrading human beings to the level of things, Kant’s view of marriage as
a contract debases the conjugal union in which husband and wife should
become one through love.
Thus, the husband and the wife in Hegel’s account of the family are
partners, bound together by love, on an equal footing. The Hegelian
family, however, is the 19th-century bourgeois family with its gendered
division of labor. Hegel believed that men and women were di}erent by
nature: He held that men are active and rational and women are passive
and emotional.64 Under this theory, men participate in the world external
to the family through their work while women’s sphere is the domestic
one. The man as husband and father is in control of family property in
Hegel’s view. Thus, a tension arises between Hegel’s acknowledgment
of equality between husband and wife as the conjugal partners and his
di}erentiation between them in regard to their tasks and areas of author-
ity. Where equality between man and wife was presupposed in love as
the condition constitutive of the conjugal union, hierarchy is maintained
in the relationship between the parents and the children. Parents have
the right to discipline their children to bring them up properly so they
develop “the self-su�ciency and freedom of personality.” Hegel believed
that the family naturally dissolves when the children come of age and
leave to form their own families. He held that marriage can also be dis-
solved by divorce if the conjugal partners find the relationship antagonis-
tic and irreconcilable.65
Hegel’s accounts of love, family, and community are helpful for recon-
structing why Hosoi did not follow the conventions of colonial romance
in his allegorization of Korea and Japan as a 13-year-old girl and her
patriarchal guardian. As mentioned above, in his 1923 essay, “Beginning
of Union Between the Japanese and Koreans,” Hosoi allegorized Korea
as a young girl who wanted to be free to choose her lover against the

42 / Translation and the Community of Love
will of her guardian. I have already highlighted how Hosoi presented the
relationship between Japan and Korea not as an amorous one between
a man and a woman but as a familial one in which Japan served as the
paternal guardian for the girl Korea. Hosoi slighted love (renai) as amo-
rous feelings when he likened Koreans’ longing for independence to a
13-year-old girl’s yearning for unhindered romantic love. For him, such
love is a frivolous emotion that dissipates as passion burns away. True
love is not contingent on capricious passion. Only the institution of fam-
ily brings stability to an amorous relationship, as seen in Hegel’s account.
Marriage, the core of the family, however, presupposes equality between
the two parties who volunteer to subordinate their independent person-
alities to the conjugal union. If the annexation of Korea was the result of
illegitimate force, it could not be allegorized as marriage.
The widely circulated story about the eminent liberal Japanese poli-
tician Ozaki Yukio’s 1920 meeting with the prominent Korean social
activist and journalist Yi Sangjae is indicative of the di�culty faced by
the colonizer in allegorizing a colonial relationship as a conjugal one.66
Ozaki was one of the many Japanese politicians who visited Korea after
the March First movement to investigate the political conditions in the
colony. One of the Korean leaders from whom Ozaki sought an opinion
was Yi. When Ozaki remarked that “Japan and Korea are like a married
couple. Even if the husband makes a small mistake, won’t it be too harsh
for the wife to rise against him?” Yi replied, “Surely, you’re right. But what
if they are not a legitimately married couple and actually were forced to
marry?” What is implied in Yi’s riposte is that Korea and Japan were not
only on an unequal footing but that their union was illegitimate because
it was forced onto Korea against its will. As Hegel argued, marriage
should not be arranged especially against the will of the female partner.67
Furthermore, it can be annulled if the marital relationship falls apart
irrecoverably. In other words, the trope of marriage can do disservice
to colonial discourse, which assumes the inevitability of colonial rule
and justifies the hierarchical relationship between the colonizer and the
colonized because marriage can be dissolved and is based on the presup-
position of equality between the conjugal partners. Hosoi’s concern for
Korean women’s su}ering under Korean men’s oppression also suggests
that he would agree with Hegel on a more equal relationship between
husband and wife.68
Thus, it would not be too far-fetched to argue that because Hosoi
detected the problems in the widely used trope of marriage for represent-
ing the Japan– Korea relationship, he could not help but choose as his

Translation and the Community of Love / 43
metaphor the relationship of parent and child.69 As seen above, unlike
the conjugal relationship, the relationship between parents and children
is hierarchical even in the Hegelian family even though it also hinges on
love. What is more problematic about Hosoi’s allegory is that Korea is
represented as a family member adopted into the extended but organi-
cally unified familial community of the Japanese nation.70 When dis-
cussing national character, Hosoi had regarded a nation as an extension
of blood ties by arguing that an individual belongs to a nation through
ties with his ancestors and descendents. To obviate any contradictions
in this pseudo-familial connection to the nation, a view not unique to
Hosoi, he might have chosen marriage as a more convincing trope for
the union of Japan and Korea.71 As discussed above, however, the implied
equality between the conjugal partners in the trope of marriage ruled
marriage out as an e}ective metaphor for the hierarchical unity between
Japan and Korea. Accordingly, Korea ended up being allegorized as an
adopted child instead.
Hosoi’s allegory makes Japan a fatherly or brotherly guardian who
treats his child with benevolence but does not hesitate to discipline her
for her own good. It is also implied that such benevolence should and
would be reciprocated by the child with respectful obedience. In the same
1926 essay in which the allegory is presented, Hosoi even echoes Hegel’s
idea of the natural dissolution of the Hegelian family, hinting that Korea
might be granted autonomy when it reaches maturity under the guid-
ance of Japan.72 Unlike in the Hegelian family, however, it is not specified
when the family naturally dissolved in Hosoi’s allegory. Its dissolution is
postponed indefinitely. By the time he delivered this speech, “The Great
Significance of Mutual Support and Love, and the Korean Problem,”
Hosoi had firmly concluded that Japan and Korea must become one fam-
ily and should stay united as a family against the white race who had
conquered “nine-tenths of the world.”73
It is clear why Hosoi’s justification of Japanese rule over Korea relied on
the schematization of the relationship between the Japanese and Koreans
as a quasi-family. As the logical extension of Hosoi’s privileging of fam-
ily and love on the basis of Hegel’s view of the family, civil society, and
the state, it can be said that there was nothing more e}ective than family
as a metaphor of the foundation on which the genuine unity between the
Japanese and Koreans can be imagined. Hosoi could not identify such
a foundation in either the state or civil society. As described by Hegel,
civil society was the economic realm in which individuals compete in
pursuing self-interest. As discussed earlier, Hosoi himself lamented the

44 / Translation and the Community of Love
disintegration of the communal sense in Japan because of selfishness
and materialism he found rampant in Japanese society. Consequently,
for him, civil society could not be a privileged arena in which harmony
between the Japanese and Koreans would be realized.
Nor, in Hosoi’s view, could the Japanese state alone constitute a sub-
stratum on which the harmony between the Japanese and Koreans could
be built. The Hegelian state, placed above the family and civil society,
constitutes the ethical entity under which the sectarian schisms of civil
society are sutured and individuals are harmoniously connected to the
community. In contrast, the Japanese state failed to realize genuine unity
between the Japanese and Koreans because its ruthless application of law
to the colony only alienated the colonized further.
On the other hand, as the family plays the important role of the ethical
foundation for the state in Hegel’s thought, it also figured prominently in
Hosoi’s thought as the metaphor of an imaginary sphere in which the per-
sistent conflicts between the Japanese and Koreans were destined to come
to an end and the two peoples were brought into harmony by the power
of love.74 Love is the key to understanding Hosoi’s endeavors to bring the
Japanese and Koreans into harmony. The love Hosoi advocated was the
colonizer’s benevolent caring of the colonized. Hosoi launched his trans-
lation projects of Korean classics to foster the Japanese understanding of
Koreans and their culture, arguing that if the Japanese could understand
through the translations of Korean literary and historical classics that
the defects of Korean national character had come from Koreans’ histori-
cal experience of oppressive rule by their own ruling class, the Japanese
would empathize with Koreans and embrace them as their new brothers
and sisters. In Hosoi’s view, knowledge and empathy unified in under-
standing would lead to building a genuine community of colonizers and
the colonized because Koreans would reciprocate Japanese empathy with
loyalty to the Japanese state. It goes without saying that this genuine
community would still hinge on the hierarchical relationship in which
the Japanese would guide backward Koreans toward progress. In sum, at
the heart of Hosoi’s translation projects of Korean literature and history
lay the colonizer’s desire for knowledge about and recognition from the
colonized. The desire went unfulfilled because of the continuing mutual
hatred between the Japanese and Koreans. Hosoi’s notion of love as
the spiritual bond of a genuine community of colonizers and the colo-
nized alike grew out of his concerns over diehard antagonisms between
Koreans and the Japanese, which understanding alone would never curb.

Translation and the Community of Love / 45
In that sense, Hosoi’s figuration of the relationship between Japan
and Korea as a quasi-family based on love revealed that attempts were
made primarily within the arena of culture to overcome political con-
flicts brought about by Japan’s colonization of Korea precisely because
they could not be resolved within the realm of politics so long as colonial
domination continued to exist.

46
As the war with China dragged on following Japan’s initial military suc-
cesses in 1937, the Japanese colonial authority stepped up the total mo –
bilization of colonial Korea for the war e}ort. The importance of Korea
came to be spotlighted because of the large size of its population and its
geographical proximity to China and Manchuria. Consequently, interest
in Korea and the Asian continent grew in Japan. Modern Korean litera-
ture for the first time drew substantial attention from the Japanese liter-
ary establishment. Quite a few Japanese literary luminaries, including
Yasuda Yojūrō, Hayashi Fusao, and Kobayashi Hideo, went to Korea on
their way to Manchuria and met writers and poets in the Japanese colony
and the occupied territories. Korean literature of the day, including short
stories and poetry, also came to be translated into Japanese. The bulk of
Korean-language literary works, however, remained unknown in Japan.
It was in that context that the Japanese-language theatrical play based on
a traditional Korean story Ch’unhyangjŏn (The Tale of Spring Fragrance)1
was staged at the Tsukiji Theater in Tokyo in early 1938 and later that
year was performed in Japanese in Korea as well.
This chapter examines the 1938 staging of Ch’unhyangjŏn, a love
story derived from a Korean folktale, and the ensuing controversy. In
particular, the staging of the play in Korea provoked heated debate over
the issue of translation. As part of the controversy, Korean and Japanese
intellectuals tackled such issues as colonialism, nationalism, and culture.
I use this concrete historical case to criticize the very influential view
that the ideal model of translation is an equal exchange between two lan-
guages. I argue that such a view was inscribed both in the logic that the
colonizers used to justify the colonial translation and in the thinking of
the colonized who resisted it. In other words, I focus my criticism on the
2. Treacherous Translation
The 1938 Japanese-Language Theatrical
Version of the Korean Tale Ch’unhyangjŏn

Treacherous Translation / 47
view of translation as equal exchange. To achieve this goal, I employ the
arguments of Karl Marx, who astutely critiqued symmetrical reciproc-
ity in equal exchange, and those of Emmanuel Levinas, who stringently
insisted on the asymmetry of the ethical relationship between the self
and the other. I read Marx through Levinas to reveal the ethical aspect
of Marx’s political economy and Levinas through Marx to explicate the
implications of Levinas’s ethics for radical politics in order to criticize the
idea of equal exchange based on reciprocity, which is not only inherent in
the conventional view of translation but also prevalent in the colonizer’s
justification for colonial dominance.2
tr ansl ation and coloni al discourse
As Naoki Sakai has argued, translation can reify boundaries between
two languages by leading to the assumption that each language is exter-
nally independent and internally unified.3 If one person were to encoun-
ter another who is speaking a language absolutely foreign to him, that
person cannot even tell whether the verbal sounds the other is making
are semantically and syntactically comprehensible verbal expressions or
merely a series of idiosyncratic exclamations incomprehensible to any-
one else or even imitations of animal sounds. If, say, a second stranger
approached the person and informed him that the sounds in question
belong to, say, a local version of the Zoque language spoken by a hand-
ful of people in Ayapan, Tabasco, Mexico, and she happens to be one of
the very few outsiders who have learned the language and that she is
willing to translate what the man is saying.4 Only after she o}ers her
account of what language the man is speaking and serves as an inter-
mediary with him in dialogue do the incomprehensible sounds coming
out of the man’s mouth register as a language, one identified as a dialect
of the Zoque language. The first person cannot even begin to locate the
boundaries between the man’s language and his own until the translator
steps in and represents him in language. A hypothetical situation like
this one, which appears unlikely to occur, however, shows the way in
which translation makes it possible to schematize the di}erence between
incomprehensibility and comprehensibility in language as boundaries
between languages. In other words, only after the initial absolute for-
eignness of what the man is enunciating is tamed through translation as
the relative foreignness of language is it possible to envision boundaries
between known and unknown languages. Furthermore, once boundaries
between the two languages are demarcated, the foreign language can be

48 / Treacherous Translation
imagined as internally homogeneous and externally autonomous equal
to other known languages. Put di}erently, although it is often taken as
a given that human language is divided into di}erent languages with
clearly demarcated boundaries, the idea of language split into such sepa-
rable, and thus countable, units as Russian, English, Korean, and so on
cannot make much sense unless linguistic boundaries are schematized
through translation.
By forcing attention to the di}erences between languages, translation
in the conventional sense thus reifies the autonomous, homogeneous
language communities the di}erences between which it is intended to
bridge. Such reification tends to position the two language communi-
ties on the same plane. In other words, the assumption that there exist
internally unified and externally independent languages leads to a sec-
ond assumption, that there exists an equal relationship between the lan-
guages and communities associated with those languages. Translation
from that perspective is nothing less than reciprocal exchange between
two languages and language communities. The ideal translation in this
sense, as George Steiner claimed in After Babel, is exchange without loss
of meaning or aesthetic value.5
However, as Tejaswini Niranjana has argued, the idea of translation
as equal exchange tends to be oblivious to, and thus becomes complicit
with, the hegemonic domination inscribed in the very process of transla-
tion. She asserts that Steiner’s view of the ideal translation as exchange
without loss is not only futile but also treacherous in the colonial context
because it masks the unequal power relationship that sets the condi-
tions for colonial translation. Whereas Niranjana focuses her criticism
of colonial translation on the problems concerning the representation of
the colonized and their culture by a process of translation that is always
permeated by unequal power relationships, I call attention to the homol-
ogy between translation and colonial discourse.6 As briefly mentioned in
the preface, both translation and colonial discourse are simultaneously
based on the di}erence between the colonized and the colonizer and
intended to overcome it. Even though Steiner urged translators to try to
reach the ideal of exchange without loss, he nonetheless admitted that it
cannot be realized. The ideal cannot be reached because of the inerasable
di}erence between languages, just as the abolition of colonial discrimi-
nation cannot be achieved because of the unyielding di}erence between
the colonized and colonizer in colonial discourse.
As Homi Bhabha has argued, the denial of di}erence between the
colonizer and the colonized coexists and works together with the

Treacherous Translation / 49
acknowledgement of that same di}erence to perpetuate colonial domina-
tion.7 As a consequence, colonial discourse is haunted by the ambivalence
that results from the simultaneous recognition and denial of di}erence
between the colonized and the colonizer. My acknowledgment of this
simultaneous denial and recognition of di}erence is not, however, simply
a reiteration of the criticism of the Manichean opposition between the
colonized and the colonizer, overdosing on the notion of ambivalence in
colonial discourse that Bhabha valorized as subversive disruption of colo-
nial domination. In other words, my argument is not to slavishly follow
an abstruse theory abstracted from the experience of European coloniza-
tion. As Oguma Eiji has documented well by drawing on scholarly writ-
ings, newspaper and journal articles, and memoirs by Japanese people
about the Japanese colonies, Japanese colonial discourse also oscillated
between the acknowledgement and disavowal of the di}erence between
the Koreans and the Japanese.8
As slogans like “harmony between Japan and Korea” (nissen yūwa) and
“Japan– Korea as one body” (naisen ittai) imply, Japanese colonial assimi-
lation (dōka) policy was theoretically directed at the amalgamation of
Koreans and Japanese, but in practice, it entailed unilaterally forcing
Koreans to “become” Japanese. Enforcement of the assimilation policy
intensified after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. As men-
tioned above, the Japanese state needed to secure support from Koreans
for its war e}ort because of Korea’s geographical proximity to China
and Manchuria and its large population.9 The assimilation policy, how-
ever, could not eradicate the di}erences between Koreans and Japanese.
According to its logic, discrimination could come to an end only when
all di}erences between the colonized and colonizer disappeared. Existing
di}erences between the colonized and the colonizer served to legitimize
discriminatory practices.
The unreachable promise of erasing di}erence between the colonized
and colonizers is ubiquitous in colonial discourse. Colonial domination
relies on the di}erence between the colonized and the colonizer, which
in turn serves to justify the colonial hierarchy and discriminatory prac-
tices. Simultaneously, however, colonial discourse asserts that the dif-
ference between the colonized and the colonizer will disappear in the
future, along with discrimination, when the colonized finally succeed in
becoming assimilated into the colonizer. But the erasure of di}erence is
delayed forever. Accordingly, colonial discourse is plagued by ambiva-
lence because it oscillates between the colonial practice of fixating the
identity of the colonized on their di}erence from the colonizer and the

50 / Treacherous Translation
gesture of eradicating the di}erence, which justifies colonial discrimina-
tion. In short, colonial discourse depends on the dual operation of empha-
sizing and denying the di}erence between the colonized and the colo-
nizer. On that point, colonial discourse and translation are homologous.
Translation recognizes di}erences between languages and cultures and
simultaneously intends to bridge them. Colonial discourse thus operates
homologously with translation as understood conventionally.
The place of equal exchange in the conventional definition of transla-
tion is also homologous with the strategy of colonial discourse, which
never fails to render the relationship between the colonizer and the colo-
nized as something reciprocal and beneficial to both. Colonial discourse
never stops describing pairs placed in lopsided power relations as sym-
metrically reciprocal. It portrays the colonial relationship as reciprocity
by insisting that colonial development benefits the colonized and by
disregarding the violence and injustice on which economic and social
development under colonial rule rests. It works to convince the colonized
that colonial violence, injustice, and discrimination are somehow bear-
able in exchange for the virtues of a modern market economy and the
social institutions that colonial power introduces. The dignity, justice,
and autonomy of the colonized are (de)valued to the point they can be
traded for the colonizers’ investment in modern infrastructure and the
introduction of capitalism.
For example, there have been numerous scholarly and nonscholarly
arguments made that Japanese colonial rule significantly advanced the
economy in Korea. One of the most memorable instances of such an
argument was a statement made by Kubota Kan’ichirō, the chief Japanese
delegate at the diplomatic talks between Japan and South Korea in 1953.
Kubota told his Korean counterparts that the contributions made by
Japan to the economic development of Korea during the colonial period
cancelled out any demand from the South Korean government for com-
pensation for Japan’s colonization of Korea.10 In other words, what colo-
nial discourse continues propagating, even in the postcolonial era, is that
colonial domination o}ered equal exchange between the colonizers and
the colonized! As Marx pointed out, it is not two parties equal in eco-
nomical, political, or cultural power that establish equal exchange. On
the contrary, it is the equivalents in the act of exchange that posit the two
parties as equal to each other.11 Thus, what should be problematized is the
insistence on symmetrical reciprocity in colonialism and equal exchange
and not the impossibility of symmetrical reciprocity or the unattainabil-
ity of exchange without loss in translation.

Treacherous Translation / 51
Marx o}ered a sharp critique of the presumption of symmetrical reci-
procity.12 In Grundrisse, he pointed out that circulation of exchange values
relates to the two most important ideological concepts of bourgeois soci-
ety, freedom and equality based on symmetrical reciprocity.13 Put simply,
the parties to an exchange come of their own volition into a relationship
of exchange on equal terms because it is assumed that the relationship
is beneficial to both of them. Deriding French socialists of his day who
regarded exchange and exchange value as “a system of universal freedom
and equality” and blamed capital for disrupting equal exchange, Marx
argued that the emergence of capital in the development of the system
of exchange is “merely the realization of equality and freedom, which
prove to be inequality and unfreedom.”14 Marx cogently suggested that
it is pointless to privilege exchange and exchange value as the source of
equality and freedom over capital because exchange value will inevitably
turn into capital, whereas labor for production will develop into wage
labor.15 Thus he criticized the bourgeois ideology of equality and freedom
premised on symmetrical reciprocity in equal exchange for operating in
agreement with the inequality and unfreedom inherent in the relation-
ship between capital and wage labor.
As is well known, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx clari-
fied his criticism of symmetrical reciprocity in exchange by proposing
his famous dictum, “from each according to his ability to each according
to his need.”16 What one takes is not to be determined by what one gives
but rather by what one needs. For Marx, justice is not served by sym-
metrical reciprocity mediating equal exchange on which the bourgeois
ideas of freedom and equality rest. Rather, justice can be achieved only
when such symmetrical reciprocity is liquidated in favor of unlimited
care for the demands of others. This in turn establishes an inevitably
asymmetrical relationship between the self and others. Certainly it is
an ethical imperative that obliges one to give up symmetrical reciproc-
ity and give in to the demands of others who need more than they can
provide one in the relationship.
The ethicality of Marx’s critique of symmetrical reciprocity comes
into clearer view when read side by side with Levinas on the responsibil-
ity of the self for the other. In conversation with Philippe Nemo, Levinas
argued that “the intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation. In
this sense, I am responsible for the other without waiting for reciprocity,
were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his a}air.”17 Levinas thus insisted on
the self ’s unceasing concern for the other, even while realizing that the
other cannot be reduced to an object that can be appropriated by the self

52 / Treacherous Translation
for its own interests. In contrast to the ethical relationship of asymmetry,
symmetrical reciprocity presumes that the other and the self are equal to
each other in the relationship and thus interchangeable. It presupposes
that the other is the same as the self and thus denies the singularity of
the other as well as of the self.
In other words, an individual is put into an unceasing cycle of equal
exchange with others in which that individual tries to maximize his or
her benefit in symmetrical reciprocity based on the assumption that the
others are also trying to get the most out of exchange. As a consequence,
symmetrical reciprocity does not allow for the absolute otherness of the
other. Put di}erently, equal exchange based on symmetrical reciproc-
ity pivots on the cunning calculation that one does to benefit from the
relationship in proportion to what one contributes to it. This symmetri-
cal reciprocity does not take into account the unlimited responsibility
imposed on the self toward the other. According to Levinas, such a situ-
ation is unethical.
Special importance is accorded to language in Levinas’s ethics.
Throughout his two most important works, Totality and Infinity and
Other wise Than Being,18 Levinas hinted that language is itself the rela-
tionship with the other, who is foreign to the self. The essence of lan-
guage is not the transmission of ideas between interlocutors but is instead
what indicates “the irreversibility of the relationship between me and the
other.”19 It is worth repeating in a discussion on the ethicality of language
that, in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas made a distinction between the two
aspects of language, what he called the saying and the said. As discussed
in some detail in the preface, the said refers to the content, idea, and theme
of discourse.20 On the other hand, saying describes the event in which the
self is summoned to approach the other in discourse.21 Although Levinas
admitted that the saying can be manifested only in the said, he clearly
prioritized the former over the latter because it is the very condition of
possibility of discourse as an ethical relationship. The self ’s freedom is
constrained in language by the other. The self is helplessly exposed to
misunderstanding and the refusal of understanding by the other, which it
cannot control.22 Despite the uncertainty presented by the saying, the self
is responsible for engaging in dialogue with the other. Thus language is
ethical practice in the relationship with the other. As I will discuss below,
this essence of language as ethical is what I intend to emphasize in dealing
with the problem of translation, which surfaced in the controversy over the
Japanese-language version of the popular Korean romance Ch’unhyangjŏn
staged by the Japanese theatrical company Shinkyō in 1938.

Treacherous Translation / 53
ambi valent text and treacherous tr ansl ation
Ch’unhyangjŏn is believed to have been first developed as p’ansori tradi-
tional one-man opera and later transcribed into written form. The oldest
extant text of Ch’unhyangjŏn is a classical Chinese verse, seven charac-
ters per line, written by Yu Chinhan in 1754, reportedly after listening
to a p’ansori performance of the story.23 Although the text has been pre-
sented in numerous versions, its main storyline can be summarized as a
love story between Ch’unhyang, the daughter of a kisaeng (courtesan),
and Mongnyong, the son of the local magistrate in a southwestern city
called Namwŏn during the Chosŏn period. They fall in love and secretly
marry despite the di}erence in their social positions. Fate separates them
when the hero’s father is transferred to a new position in the capital. The
new local magistrate, Pyŏn Hakto, is enthralled by Ch’unhyang’s beauty
and tries to make her his concubine, but she refuses out of loyalty to her
husband and endures harassment and even torture and imprisonment at
Pyŏn’s hands. Meanwhile Mongnyong, having passed the civil service
examination and taken the post of the king’s secret inspector, returns to
Namwŏn to save Ch’unhyang, and the story ends happily.
Ch’unhyangjŏn’s popularity grew during the colonial period.24 From
the mid-1930s on, theatrical performances of the story were increasingly
frequent on the stage in Korea.25 Thus it was not surprising when the
Tōkyō Haksaengyesuljwa (Tokyo Students’ Art Theater), a Korean stu-
dent theatrical company based in Tokyo, staged the Korean dramatist
Yu Ch’ijin’s Korean-language play of the story in Tokyo in 1937.26 After
seeing it, the playwright and director Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901– 1977)
was im pressed by the story and decided to stage his own theatrical
version in Japanese.27 Murayama was one of the leading figures in the
Puro re taria Engekidōmei (Japan Proletarian Theater League). In 1934,
Murayama had proposed the consolidation of various leftist theatrical
companies that had been weakened under the government pressure into
one progressive theatrical company, and that year he founded Shinkyō
Gekidan (Shinkyō Theatrical Company). Until it was closed by the gov-
ernment in 1940, Shinkyō continued to stage realistic plays with social
agendas and consequently maintained its reputation as the premier leftist
theater company in Japan.28
In an article published in the journal Chōsen oyobi Manshū (Korea
and Manchuria) just before his play was first staged in Japan in 1938,
Murayama explained why he chose to stage a Japanese-language version
of the story.29 First, Murayama wanted to present Korean culture to the

54 / Treacherous Translation
Japanese people as what he regarded as one of the maternal bodies (botai)
of Japanese culture. Second, he specifically selected Ch’unhyangjŏn from
among Korean literary works because it was the most popular and thus
most representative literary creation of Korea. Third, he hoped to enter-
tain Koreans living and working in Japan and expected many of them
to see the play. He claimed that because the story contained the soul of
Korea, he would attempt to depict the Koreanness (Chōsenteki na mono)
of the story as precisely as possible.30
Murayama asked the writer Chang Hyŏkchu to write a Japanese-
language script.31 There were good reasons why Murayama chose Chang.
First of all, Chang was familiar with the story because he was also plan-
ning to stage Ch’unhyangjŏn in cooperation with novelist Yuasa Katsue,
although the project stalled and did not come to fruition.32 Furthermore,
Chang was the most famous Korean writer in Japan who worked in the
Japanese language in the 1930s. He made his literary debut in Japan when
his novella Gakidō (The Path of Hungry Ghosts) won second place in the
Kaizō literary award competition of 1932. The story described the hard-
ships faced by Korean peasants under the Japanese rule. The Akutagawa
literary award had not yet been founded, so at the time the Kaizō award
was a rare and competitive venue for newcomers to gain access to the
literary establishment.33
Chang studied various versions of the story, including a changgŭk
(Korean opera) version.34 From the beginning, however, he emphasized
that the script would be his own and not merely a translation of some
existing text.35 After finishing his script, he published it in March 1938
in the Japanese literary journal Shinchō (New Tide).36 Murayama felt that
Chang’s script lacked dramatic tension and made his own revisions with
the help of Yu Ch’ijin, whose Korean-language play he had originally
been inspired by.37 It is interesting to note that Murayama also took
the liberty of introducing elements of kabuki, long promoted as one
of the most Japanese forms of stage art, into the play even though he
had pledged that he would present the Koreanness of the story as faith-
fully as possible.38 He also experimented with cross-gender casting in
the play, probably following Kabuki practice in which male actors play
female roles. However, Murayama reversed the conventions of kabuki by
casting a female actor for the role of the hero. Actress Akagi Ranko was
cast as the hero Yi Mongnyong, and Ichikawa Haruyo, a movie star of
the Nikkatsu studio, as the heroine Ch’unhyang.39 Other male roles were
played by male actors. Incorporating elements of kabuki was an impor-
tant innovation, Murayama explained, which opened up new possibilities

Treacherous Translation / 55
for modern theater.40 His decision provoked controversy: One reviewer
argued that kabuki-style acting infused into the play made it di�cult to
locate “Koreanness,” and another regarded it as a symptom of the com-
mercialization of the Shinkyō theatrical company.41
Nonetheless, reviews of Murayama’s staging of Chang’s play were
mostly favorable, but for varying reasons. Both the government and
critics of the government appreciated the success of the play for utterly
di}erent reasons. For example, Hirata Isao, the thought prosecutor noto-
rious for his role in the tenkō (ideological conversion) of the Communist
Party leaders Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, wrote a review in
the magazine Teatoro (Theater) reflecting the essence of the government
response. Although praising the play primarily for “keeping away from
ideology and o}ering a fantasy,” Hirata maintained that, by incorporat-
ing elements of the kabuki style into a modern drama, the play contrib-
uted to the further development of the Japanese traditional performance
art. More important, he extolled the performance as an e}ort to promote
the harmony between Japan and Korea and did not forget to mention the
importance of Korea in the current situation of the Sino-Japanese War.42
Alongside Hirata’s review, Teatoro published another review by Fuse
Tatsuji, the lawyer famous for his e}orts defending leftists and Koreans.
Fuse read an allegory of the plight of the colonized into the play. Calling
attention to the discord between responses from the Korean and Japanese
audience members, he found that certain scenes evoked tears from the
Korean audience but laughter from the Japanese. He encouraged Japanese
audiences to ponder the meaning of anger and tears of the Korean audi-
ence and insinuated that the emotions of the Korean audience were re –
lated to the colonial reality in which they were caught. He continued to
imply that Ch’unhyang’s determined faithfulness to her husband in the
face of threats from the local magistrate signified more than one woman’s
loyalty to her lover. In the end, he suggested that Ch’unhyang was ele-
vated to a heroic character to reproach an unjust authority.43
The diverse and even conflicting views presented by the reviews sug-
gest that the play itself was a text haunted by ambivalence, allowing
viewers to read various subtexts into it. Critical intellectuals and gov-
ernment o�cials both surely saw the play, with its exotic costumes and
kabuki-style acting, as a departure from Shinkyō’s reputation as a leftist
theatrical company, and one review criticized it for the same commer-
cialism Hirata, the thought prosecutor, praised it for.44 However, in the
tradition of leftist theater, the play still retained certain scenes, including
Korean peasants su}ering from unjust rule, which could be interpreted

56 / Treacherous Translation
as political messages. It thus allowed viewers to see the play as criticism
of the Japanese colonial rule if they stretched their sensitivity to colonial
injustice enough to juxtapose the play with the colonial realities under
which the colonized were placed.
After a successful 20-day run at the Tsukiji Little Theater in Tokyo in
March and April, the performance toured Osaka and Kyoto. According
to Murayama, many in the audience in these cities were Korean. Later
that same year, Shinkyō launched a tour of Korea, marking, as Mura-
yama proudly claimed, the first time a Japanese theatrical company had
performed for Korean audiences in Korea.45 The play was performed by
Japanese actors, in the Japanese language, for colonized Korean audi-
ences, and Murayama expected it to promote cultural exchange in the-
ater between Japan and Korea.46 Akita Ujaku, a dramatist and writer who
went to Korea with Shinkyō, wrote in the Japanese-language Seoul news-
paper Keijō Nippō (Seoul Daily) that the company wanted to perform in
Korea not just because it had been successful in Japan but because it was
desirable to show Koreans the results of the “cultural blending between
the two peoples.”47
In contrast to mixed reviews in Japan, the response from Korean re –
viewers was uniformly unfavorable, skeptical, and even hostile. In the
criticisms of the Korean critics Chang’s script was derided as a poor
translation that failed to measure up to the original story. In a Japanese-
language review printed in a Japanese-language journal, Chōsen (Korea),
the philologist Sin T’aehyŏn harshly criticized the play for failing to deliver
an “accurate” representation of Korean customs and culture. He ascribed
Chang’s inadequate interpretation of the story to his lack of background
knowledge about Ch’unhyangjŏn.48 In the Korean-language newspaper
Chosŏn Ilbo (Korea Daily), the literary critic Yi Wŏnjo also disapproved
of Chang’s “translation” of the original language of Ch’unhyangjŏn. Yi
saw Ch’unhyangjŏn’s particular value resulting from the p’ansori form in
which it was narrated. Because Ch’unhyangjŏn in written form had been
transcribed from songs performed before audiences, it retained the meter
of the original verses. Thus he argued that the value of Ch’unhyangjŏn
had everything to do with its language, and held that Chang’s rendering
of the story neutralized the musicality of the original Ch’unhyangjŏn,
which he credited for its artistic value.49
Chang responded by adamantly claiming that his script was his own
creation, not a translation. Chang correctly acknowledged the multiple
origins of the story.50 He pointed out that there were a number of di}er-
ent versions of Ch’unhyangjŏn, including p’ansori and changgŭk versions

Treacherous Translation / 57
as well as those in written form.51 Chang explained that initially he tried
to translate the story word by word from existing written versions but
found it impossible to preserve the charms of the original tale. As a con-
sequence, he decided to write his own modern Ch’unhyangjŏn, borrowing
only the storyline, characters, and setting. By emphasizing the di}er-
ence between his own and previous versions of Ch’unhyangjŏn, Chang
attempted to establish a case for his claim that the script was his own
creation and not a translation of another’s original. He also insisted on
the heterogeneous origins of the story to argue that there was no single
reference point for his script and that it was not a translation parasitically
dependent on the original text.
If Chang’s claim was not unreasonable, neither was the Korean critics’
insistence that his script was, in fact, a translation. Inasmuch as Chang
asserted on several occasions that he wrote the script with the intention
of introducing Korean culture to Japanese audiences, what he did with
Ch’unhyangjŏn was to present the story to those who did not share the
language and culture as well as to those who regarded it as their own.52 In
other words, he translated an original story that was deemed representa-
tive of Korean culture into another language so that it could be under-
stood by Japanese audiences. As long as Chang’s script was connected to
the original story that supposedly represented authentic Korean culture
and customs and as long as Chang’s intention with the script was to
show Korean culture and customs to Japanese people who did not know
much about them, Koreans regarded the play as a translation in a nega-
tive sense, as a secondary, parasitic copy of an original. Korean critics
took issue with Chang’s representation of the original story because they
deemed it to be an inaccurate translation.
equal exch ange and tr ansl ation
The problems of translation as equal exchange and its collusion with colo-
nial domination surfaced in a roundtable discussion among Japanese and
Korean intellectuals convened in Seoul as the Japanese-language Ch’un-
hyangjŏn went on stage there in late October 1938. The Japanese present
included Murayama and Akita from Shinkyō, a Keijō Imperial University
professor of Chinese literature named Karashima Takeshi, and Furukawa
Kanehide, the director of the publication censorship department of the
Government General. They were joined by the writer Hayashi Fusao,
who was visiting Korea on his way to Manchuria and northern China.
Koreans on the panel included Chang, the poet Chŏng Chiyong, the lit-

58 / Treacherous Translation
erary critic and poet Im Hwa, the writer and Posŏng College professor
Yu Chino, the literary critic Kim Munjip, the writer Yi T’aejun, and the
dramatist Yu Ch’ijin, who had helped Murayama revise Chang’s script. 53
Convened under the title “Chōsen Bunka no Shōrai” (The Future of
Korean Culture), the roundtable discussion had not been intended to be
about the play, but the play quickly became the central topic of discussion.
The Koreans argued in unison that Ch’unhyangjŏn could not be translated
and that, once translated, its value was lost and it was not Ch’unhyangjŏn
anymore. Hayashi countered by asking them whether they were suggest-
ing a total denial of translation. Karashima shrewdly tried to maneuver
the discussion in a di}erent direction, taking up a point made previously
by a Korean participant who commented that professional writers in Korea
faced economic di�culties because of the small market for literary works
there. He said that if Korean writers had their works translated into Japa-
nese, they would find a bigger market among Japanese readers. However,
Karashima’s economic argument failed to divert the Korean participants
from continuing to return to the problem of translation. The Koreans
insisted that, in the course of its translation into Chang and Murayama’s
play, Ch’unhyangjŏn had lost its inherent value because it was impossible
for it to be expressed in Japanese. In response to the persistence of the
Koreans, Murayama admitted that Japanese might feel the same way
about an English translation of Manyōshū, the thousand-year-old verse
collection Japanese nationalist scholars considered the essence of Japan,
but he also argued that a Japanese translation of Ch’unhyangjŏn was nec-
essary because Japanese people could not read Korean. In response, Kim
Munjip bluntly suggested that the Japanese-language Ch’unhyangjŏn was
staged not for cultural but rather for political reasons.54
Having kept silent to this point, Yi T’aejun abruptly posed a question
to the Japanese participants: He asked them whether Korean writers
should keep writing in Korean or whether they should instead create
literary works in Japanese. Akita and Murayama, following Karashima,
adhered to a purely economic logic. They argued that because the num-
ber of Japanese-language readers was greater than that of their Korean
counterparts, it might be better for them to write in Japanese because
they would have access to a larger market. Akita added that if they had
di�culty writing in Japanese, they surely could get their works trans-
lated into Japanese, but Hayashi urged the Koreans to pen their writings
directly in Japanese. Murayama o}ered a compromise that Korean writ-
ers should create literary works in Japanese while reserving the Korean
language for whatever expressions they deemed untranslatable.55

Treacherous Translation / 59
The Korean intellectuals showed two levels of concern regarding colo-
nial translation in the discourse centered on the staging of the Japanese-
language Ch’unhyangjŏn. On one level, they were wary of any misrep-
resentation of Korean culture and customs to the colonizer. On another
level, they were even more suspicious of translation as an interim stage
in the total assimilation of Korean culture into Japanese. The first level of
concern troubling the Korean intellectuals addressed the colonized’s mis-
trust of translation as representation of their culture and literature, and
eventually of themselves. Translation framed as representation, they intu-
ited, does not do justice to the original. The original is inevitably distorted
in representation. In other words, the colonized complained about the
inevitable di}erence of any translation from its original. Ch’unhyangjŏn
could not be expressed in languages other than Korean. In the eyes of the
Koreans, the translation of Ch’unhyangjŏn was not a complete exchange
between Korean and Japanese. Something valuable was lost in transla-
tion that was so essential to the story that Ch’unhyangjŏn was no longer
Ch’unhyangjŏn without it. Di}erence in the medium of expression con-
demned translation to the secondary and inferior position with respect
to the original. The exchange transpiring in the course of translating
Ch’unhyangjŏn was not an equal exchange. In short, their resistance to the
translation pointed to their aversion to an unequal exchange. The Korean
intellectuals insisted that any translation of Ch’unhyangjŏn and of Korean
literature in general was impossible because it could not guarantee equal
exchange between the two languages. They sensed that the questions
surrounding the translation at issue, the one by Maruyama and Chang
being staged in a colonial city in the colonizer’s language, were not just
linguistic or literary but rather political. They did not flinch from declar-
ing their suspicions that the staging of the Japanese-language play they
considered a translation of a Korean original they knew and loved had
much to do with the current political situation of the Sino-Japanese War,
which required the total mobilization of the colony for Japan’s war e}ort.
The debate over the Japanese version of Ch’unhyangjŏn did not stop,
however, at the colonizer’s imposition of, and the colonized’s resistance
to, translation. The Koreans’ aversion to translation indicated their in –
stinctive understanding of the collusion between colonialism and trans-
lation, which provoked the second level of their concern over colonial
translation. Just as translation may be intended to bridge the di}erences
between two languages and cultures but cannot help but point out those
very di}erences, so, too, colonialism aims at the erasure of di}erence
between the colonized and the colonizer while simultaneously retaining

60 / Treacherous Translation
discriminatory practices against the colonized marked with the di}er-
ence it claims to eradicate.
The Koreans, as the colonized, knew well that the erasure of di}erence
between them and the Japanese meant the extermination of their di}er-
ence from the colonizer, not the other way around. In other words, when it
comes to the intention of a colonial power to erase di}erence between the
colonized and the colonizer, the burden of change and assimilation falls
on the shoulders of the colonized. It is the colonized, not the colonizer,
who must adapt to colonial expectations. In the realm of literature, the
biggest di}erence between the colonized and the colonizer is language.
If the erasure of di}erence was to take place in the realm of literature,
then it would be tantamount to the extermination of the Korean language
itself. Thus the roundtable debate concerning Ch’unhyangjŏn and transla-
tion evolved into a discussion of Koreans’ creative writing in the Japanese
language. In short, the second level of concern plaguing the colonized
intellectuals was the problem of Koreans writing in Japanese. Koreans
were faced with a fundamental threat to Korean-language literature: If
Korean writers and poets wrote their works in Japanese, there would
be no need for translation. The erasure of di}erence would lead to the
condition in which exchange— translation— would become unnecessary.
Koreans were being doubly trapped in a situation from which there was
no exit. They resisted translation because they thought that it could not
ensure equal exchange between a translation and the original because of
di}erences between languages and cultures, and they sensed the looming
end of the Korean language should the even-worse condition emerge in
which translation was no longer necessary.
In response to the Koreans’ protests, the Japanese did not stop argu-
ing that the translation was equivalent to the original and the product
of a necessary exchange. The Japanese intellectuals admitted that the
translation was di}erent from the original even though translation was
intended to emulate that original to the point of becoming the same,
as if that had been ever possible. The Japanese intellectuals hinted that
even if the valuable quality to which the Koreans clung was lost in the
course of translation, it was not without compensation. In reaction to
the colonized’s protest against translation, the colonizers presented the
logic of economy. They argued that if Korean writers produced works
in Japanese, or at least had their works translated, they would be able to
reach more readers. Korean writers who could not make ends meet by
selling their writings in Korean were likely to be better o} if they found
a market for their works among Japanese-language readers because they

Treacherous Translation / 61
were more numerous than readers of Korean and clearly had an interest
in the colony and its culture.
Below the surface of this logic, which is economic in the conven-
tional sense, lurks another layer of the logic of economy that propagates
exchange based on symmetrical reciprocity between the colonizer and the
colonized. In other words, the translation, even though it is an imprecise
representation of the original, is presented as something exchangeable
for mercenary gain. The colonized are placed as one party of exchange on
the same plane with colonizers who force translation on them as a trans-
action in a literal sense. Even if exchange without loss is a tantalizing but
unrealizable possibility in the transmission of a text from one language
to another, it can only be realized extratextually. Put di}erently, the loss
that transpires in the course of translation of the text is compensated
for with material gain outside of the text. Such material compensation is
equivalent to the alleged loss in value of the original text. In other words,
the Japanese found a way to seduce the Koreans into commencing a cycle
of exchange premised on symmetrical reciprocity one way or another.
Even if the colonized’s culture and language are placed on the same
plane as the colonizer’s by the ruse of the equal exchange of translation,
the colonized do not become equal to the colonizer in political, economi-
cal, and cultural power. Equal exchange in translation rests on symmet-
rical reciprocity, which requires constituting equivalence between two
languages. As Marx pointed out, it is not two individuals on equal terms
who establish equal exchange. On the contrary, the equivalent value of
the commodities exchanged posits the owners of those commodities as
equal in the exchange.56 By forcing the colonized into equal exchange—
through translation in the case of the roundtable discussion on the future
of Korean culture— the colonizer demanded that the colonized recognize
their relationship as symmetrical and reciprocal.
My argument has so far only interpreted the implications of the colo-
nizer’s insistence on symmetrical reciprocity in his relationship with
the colonized despite the asymmetry necessarily resulting from colo-
nial domination. However, in the spirit of Marx’s famous 11th thesis on
Feuerbach,57 the point is to propose what the colonized can do in response
to radically challenge the legitimacy of that colonial domination. Before
o}ering any suggestions, however, it is necessary to examine the surge of
interest in Korean cultural tradition among intellectuals during the 1930s
to situate the debates surrounding the staging of the Japanese-language
Ch’unhyangjŏn in the intellectual atmosphere of colonial Korea of that
time.

62 / Treacherous Translation
cultur al nationalism and resistance
to coloni alism
Debates over the staging of the Japanese language Ch’unhyangjŏn took
place against a backdrop of surging interest among intellectuals in
Korean cultural tradition. The two most influential Korean-language
newspapers, Chosŏn Ilbo (Korea Daily) and Tong-a Ilbo (East Asia Daily),
spearheaded this rise in interest during the 1930s. In January 1935,
Chosŏn Ilbo ran a series of articles by such experts in Korean culture as
Yi Pyŏnggi, Kim T’aejun, and Yi Hŭisŭng addressing Korean classical
literature and literary traditions.58 The presumption of the series was that
Korean society could maintain its unique culture by carrying on its tra-
ditional arts in the face of a flood of cultural influence from the West and
Japan. Tong-a Ilbo also published articles discussing the establishment of
a Korean national literature (minjok munhak) based on its traditions.59
Preserving Korean cultural tradition had also been the center of discus-
sion in national literature debates of the 1920s in Korea as nonsocialist,
nationalist intellectuals advocated a national literature (kungmin mun-
hak) by stressing the essential importance of Korean cultural tradition
in literary writing.60 The advocates of national literature argued that
the leftist writers’ emphasis on class conflict served to bring pernicious
schisms into Korean society. The nationalist intellectuals believed that a
national literature would awaken the consciousness of the Korean nation
in the face of ever increasing pressures to slavishly follow Japan’s imita-
tion of Western culture.61
However, there was a significant di}erence between the 1920s
national literature debate and the revival of interest in Korean cultural
tradition in the mid-1930s. As the Korean scholar of literature Hwang
Chongyŏn points out, the 1920s debate emerged as a response by Korean
nationalist intellectuals to the menacing rise of the Proletarian Literature
Movement. The revival of interest in Korean cultural tradition in the
1930s, on the other hand, was a response to Japanese colonial rule. In that
sense, it is noteworthy that it coincided with the demise of the Proletarian
Literature Movement. In the atmosphere of ruthless suppression of any
political resistance including the communist movement, Korean intel-
lectuals turned to cultural tradition as a rare forum in which they were
allowed to imagine Korea’s autonomy from Japan.
Korean cultural nationalism in the 1930s was, however, also a response
to the economic boom triggered by Japan’s takeover of Manchuria in
1932.62 The Korean bourgeoisie saw the subsequent establishment of the

Treacherous Translation / 63
state of Manchukuo as an economic opportunity. The editorial of Chosŏn
Ilbo published on April 10, 1932, reflected this perspective, identifying
the establishment of the state of Manchukuo as one of the conditions
that would foster the economic development of Korea.63 Japanese aggres-
sion in China did in fact help Korean enterprises flourish. For example,
the Korean spinning and weaving company Kyŏngsŏng Pangjik, run by
Kim Yŏnsu, invested substantially in Manchuria.64 The company also
benefited greatly from the economic boom of the Sino-Japanese War in
1937.65 Tong-a Ilbo, which, along with Chosŏn Ilbo, instigated the Korean
cultural revival of the 1930s, was owned by Kim’s family.
From the perspective of the Korean bourgeoisie, Korean cultural
nationalism served to counter the internationalism of Korean leftists
that emphasized solidarity with the Chinese people against Japanese
imperialism. Moreover, Korean cultural nationalism served to mu£e the
cry for class struggle from Korean workers by emphasizing the unity of
the Korean nation over the class division of colonial society. Although
Korean cultural nationalism could have been subversive to Japanese colo-
nial domination by raising the national consciousness of Koreans, it did
not pose a real threat because of a compromise the Korean bourgeoisie
made with Japanese colonial domination. The Korean bourgeoisie gave
up on political resistance to capitalize on Japanese expansionism in East
Asia. In that sense, it is not too far-fetched to say that cultural national-
ism was the ideology of the Korean bourgeois class.66
The zeal for Korean cultural tradition spread among Korean men of
letters during the period. Munjang (Writing), the literary journal Yi
T’aejun founded in 1939, devoted many of its pages to literary works
expressive of a}ection for Korean cultural tradition. In such essays as
“Kojŏn” (Classics), “Kowan” (Artifacts), and “Kowan gwa Saenghwal”
(Artifacts and Daily Life), Yi himself expressed interest in and a}ection
for Korean cultural tradition, which he considered to be rapidly disap-
pearing from the daily life of the modern world.67 In “Ilpyŏnnakto” (A
Fragment of Paradise) and “Tongbaeknamu” (Camellias), the modernist
poet Chŏng Chiyong, another participant in the roundtable discussion on
the future of Korean culture, experimented with a quasi-traditional style
of writing peppered with archaic words and redolent of the rhythm of
classical Chinese writing. He also tried his hand at imitating naeganche,
the writing style of women of the Confucian literati class in the Chosŏn
period.68 Yu Chino, another participant in the roundtable discussion, had
dabbled in Marxism as a university student in the early 1930s and written
stories dealing with social issues, but later turned to writing such short

64 / Treacherous Translation
stories as his 1938 “Ch’angnangjŏnggi” (The Story of the Clear Water
Pavilion), which described a disappearing world of tradition.69 The cul-
tural nationalism Koreans expressed in the roundtable discussion about
the Japanese language play Ch’unhyangjŏn thus reflected a more general
interest in Korean cultural tradition in the 1930s.
The Korean cultural tradition that these Korean men of letters harked
back to was, however, that of the ruling class of Confucian literati and not
that of the peasants. This emphasis resonated with the Japan Romantic
School’s call for a revival of Japanese traditional culture. Following the
government’s crackdown on leftist movements in the early 1930s, the
Japanese intellectuals a�liated with the Japan Romantic School voiced
their concerns about the rapid ascendancy of mass culture accompany-
ing the economic boom after World War I. The popularization of culture
was most visible in the emergence of the so-called one-yen-per-book
(enpon) multivolume sets of Japanese and Western literature that the
Japanese publishing industry mass produced to target the general pub-
lic. In the eyes of the Japanese intellectuals, mass culture reduced the
worth of an artistic creation to its exchange value as a commodity. The
views of Yasuda Yojūrō, who advocated a return to Japanese classical lit-
erature and denounced both Tokugawa-period commoners’ culture and
the mass culture of his contemporary Japan, were representative: He not
only denounced modern Japanese authors for their failure to carry on
Japanese literary traditions but also criticized such modern literary forms
as novels and literary criticism as imported genres alien to the Japanese
mind.70 He went on to contend that the imperative task in the reasser-
tion of Japanese literary tradition should be to recapture “the essence of
Japanese poetry (nihon shi no kokoro) and its development in the history
of Japanese literature.”71 Like the Japan Romantic School, the rising inter-
est in Korean cultural tradition marked a more general intellectual trend
of critical reflection on modernity in the 1930s and the 1940s.
Such contemporary Korean Marxist critics as Im Hwa criticized the
surge of interest in Korean cultural tradition as regressive traditionalism.
In a series of essays he wrote in 1936 under the name Im Insik for another
Korean-language newspaper, Chosŏn Chungang Ilbo (Korea Central
Daily), he denounced the interest as a reactionary mood that not only
unscientifically glorified the past but also legitimized escapism.72 The
attacks on the Korean cultural revival did not come only from Marxists,
however. Another prominent intellectual who was skeptical about Korean
cultural tradition was Ch’oe Chaesŏ, who was trained in English litera-
ture and versed in English literary theories and who argued that cultural

Treacherous Translation / 65
development in Korea should be instead anchored in European cultural
traditions because Korean traditional culture could not o}er any contri-
bution to the development of modern culture in contemporary Korea.73
As discussed in the following chapter, by the early 1940s, Ch’oe would
become one of the most notorious collaborators with Japanese colonial-
ism. An intellectual’s position on the Korean cultural tradition revival
cannot be understood as a barometer of willingness to collaborate with
Japanese colonialism.
It is not easy to elucidate what modernity stood for in the eyes of
Korean intellectuals. Although it was unquestionably associated with the
West, as further examined in the following chapter, it was also related
to Japan because modernization had come to Korea with colonization by
Japan. In that sense, Korean cultural tradition was one of the few remain-
ing arenas in which Korean intellectuals were allowed to imagine the
autonomy of Korea with respect to Japan. Thus the preference for Korean
cultural tradition by such Korean intellectuals as Yi and the contributors
to his journal Munjang has been favorably interpreted by later readers as a
form of subversive, though passive, opposition to Japanese colonialism.74
Nevertheless, the cultural nationalism of Korean intellectuals failed to
pose any meaningful challenge to Japanese colonial rule in Korea even if
it did attempt to secure an autonomous space for Korean culture within
the Japanese empire. Thus, toward the end of the roundtable discussion,
when Hayashi proposed that Korean writers and poets should volunteer
to serve the Japanese military in China as war writers, Yu Chino wel-
comed the suggestion. Yu’s agreement made for a stark contrast with his
assertion that Korean writers should keep writing in Korean when he
rejected Hayashi’s forceful urging of the Korean panelists to produce lit-
erary works in Japanese. Yu’s support for the Japanese war e}ort was met
with no opposition from any other Korean at the roundtable.75
As demonstrated above, the Koreans at the roundtable were opposed
to the translation of Ch’unhyangjŏn because they regarded it as unequal
exchange. They adamantly maintained that something very important
was lost in the course of translation. That something was the foundation
on which they built their cultural nationalism. However, their cultural
nationalism did not contradict their agreement to support the Japanese
war e}ort. When the corps of writers that was to serve to “comfort” the
Japanese imperial military (kōgun imon sakkadan) was organized in
Korea in 1939, it included Chŏng Chiyong, Yi T’aejun, and Im Hwa, all
roundtable participants. Nonetheless, my intention here is not to accuse
these Korean intellectuals of being pro– Japanese collaborators. The three

66 / Treacherous Translation
intellectuals were not particularly cooperative with the colonial govern-
ment when compared with such infamous collaborators as Ch’oe Namsŏn,
Yi Kwangsu, Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp, and Ch’oe Chaesŏ. I rather call attention to a
specific juncture in which cultural nationalism coexisted with support for
colonial expansion. My criticism targets how the roundtable participants
mingled cultural nationalism of the colonized and collaboration with
colonial expansion in their discussion of the Japanese-language staging
of Ch’unhyangjŏn in Korea in 1938. I argue that the cultural nationalism
and collaboration did not merely coexist but rather cooperated with each
other in perpetuating the established regime of colonialism. By assuming
a symmetrical relationship between the Korean and Japanese cultures
and languages, cultural nationalism served to compensate for the political
asymmetry between the colonized and the colonizer.76 However, cultural
nationalism was not a substitute for resistance to colonial domination.
The Korean cultural nationalism manifested at the roundtable discus-
sion echoes the ethnic identity politics of multiculturalism promoted
under the current dominant U.S. ideology. Although ostensibly a gesture
toward tolerance within the borders of the American nation, multicul-
turalism fails to challenge the unquestioning loyalty that the American
nation state demands of individuals of every ethnic group, even in the
face of the most obvious imperial aggression.77
Frantz Fanon once warned colonized peoples about becoming preoccu-
pied with their own “authentic” culture and the colonizers’ slights toward
it. In Fanon’s eyes, championing a native culture is ine}ective unless it
is tied up with political and social struggles against colonial domination.
“It is around the people’s struggles that African-Negro Culture takes
on substance, and not around songs, poems, or folklore,” as Fanon suc-
cinctly put it.78 When cultural nationalism is divorced from politics, it
stops short of challenging colonial domination. Furthermore, because the
cultural nationalism of the colonized tends to focus myopically on creat-
ing autonomous space for native cultures within an empire rather than
challenging regimes of colonial domination, it can blind the colonized to
the colonial injustice inflicted on those outside their national community.
In other words, cultural and linguistic nationalism tends to lead the colo-
nized into callous indi}erence toward the colonial violence inflicted on
other colonized peoples.
Assuming symmetrical opposition between Korean and Japanese
cultures and languages, the colonized intellectuals’ cultural nationalism
worked to compensate for political asymmetry between the colonized
and the colonizer by positing cultural parity between the two. In the his-

Treacherous Translation / 67
tory of the colonized peoples’ struggles against colonial domination are
examples of how cultural nationalism among the colonized has served to
help mobilize political resistance by the colonized against the colonizer,
but what must be kept in mind is that there have been cases throughout
history in which cultural nationalism fails to challenge the legitimacy
of colonial domination. Such was the case of the Korean intellectuals at
the roundtable discussion who agreed to support the Japanese war e}ort
while being alert to any encroachment on what they saw as autonomous
space of their own culture and language.
One might be quick to protest that it is unfair to criticize the Korean
intellectuals for their failure to dissent from Japanese expansionism in
front of the colonial bureaucrat Furukawa Kanehide at the roundtable
discussion. One might further point out that it was virtually impossible
to raise a dissenting voice in general, especially during the last stage of
Japanese colonial rule, without risking imprisonment and even death.
However, the emphasis on the impossibility of voicing political dissent
inadvertently points to the limitations of a cultural nationalism like the
one expressed at the roundtable discussion. The cultural nationalism of
the Korean intellectuals could be expressed only because the Japanese
colonial authorities allowed it to be. As shown above, despite the presence
of the colonial bureaucrat at the roundtable discussion, Korean intellectu-
als voiced their displeasure with encroachment by the colonizers on “their
own culture” while silently agreeing to cooperate with the war e}ort.
tr ansl ation as an ethical as w ell as
political pr actice
The 1938 roundtable discussion about the staging of the Japanese-
language play Ch’unhyangjŏn in Korea o}ers a valuable point of departure
for investigating further the issues of reciprocity and exchange in trans-
lation and colonialism. The Korean critics sensed that the translation of
Ch’unhyangjŏn did not ensure an equal exchange between the original
and the translation and between the Korean and Japanese languages.
The refusal by these Korean critics pointed negatively to the fact that
they also adhered to the ideal model of translation as equal exchange.
In other words, they believed that translation should guarantee equal
exchange between an original and any translation made of it. Because
they thought that Chang’s rendering failed to achieve equal exchange
and, more important, that the original did not allow for such exchange,
they rejected his Ch’unhyangjŏn. However, to envision a truly radical way

68 / Treacherous Translation
of resisting colonial domination, it is necessary to be critical of the cul-
tural nationalism of colonized intellectuals who are complacently fixated
on “their own culture” but fail hopelessly to voice political criticism of
their colonial master’s expansion into other countries. In lieu of a conclu-
sion to our discussion, what I will attempt to do in the rest of the chapter
is to configure translation as an ethical as well as political practice with
the help of Levinas.
As discussed above, Levinas continuously attends to the ethical aspect
of language throughout Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being.
He insists on the ethical aspect of language as the possibility of dialogue
between the self and the other and between one community and another
that do not share common foundations for preestablished understand-
ing.79 In short, Levinas suggests that language enables the self to come
into contact with the other, who is by definition foreign to the self. The
engagement in dialogue with the other can be a traumatic experience
because the self is vulnerable to misunderstanding and the rejection of
understanding by the other, who does not share the logic and knowledge
with the self. That is why Levinas describes the ethical aspect of language
in terms of conversation between foreigners who do not share a common
ground for understanding. Thus, dialogue between the self and the other
who are foreign to each other is an event of translation. In Levinasian
ethics, the essence of language cannot be the transmission of ideas
between interlocutors. The essence of language is rather that it enables
the self to engage in dialogue with the other, who is utterly foreign to
the self. Language is the window through which the self approaches the
other, and translation is the event of the self ’s encounter with other.
The idea of translation reformulated as an ethical practice requires
the translator to humbly recognize that the task at hand is to encoun-
ter the other in language that ultimately cannot be tamed, controlled,
or completely appropriated. The translator cannot be absolved from the
responsibility for the other inscribed in the original. In other words,
the translator’s debt to the original cannot be paid o} completely in an
equal exchange because such a transaction is impossible in the asym-
metrical relationship with the other. On the contrary, the translator is
never free from the exacting relationship. While engaging with the other
as inscribed in the original text, the translator realizes the foreignness
within each of the two languages between which the translator moves.
Languages are porous to the outside. The openness of and foreignness
in languages are, however, concealed until, in the course of translation,

Treacherous Translation / 69
the translator releases them from the shackles of the idea of languages as
autonomous and homogeneous.
Levinas’s insight is useful for formulating a critique of linguistic
nationalism, which is inseparably connected to the idea of one national
community the boundaries of which coincide with those of an autono-
mous and homogeneous language community. The cultural and lin-
guistic nationalism of the Korean intellectuals is understandable if one
remembers that Korea was put under the pressure of colonial domination
that, in its last stage, sought to erase the Korean language itself from pub-
lic spaces. However, it must also not be forgotten that, while attempting
to keep intact the autonomous space for their language and culture, the
Korean intellectuals wound up cooperating with Japanese colonial expan-
sion into the Asian continent. Their refusal of translation thus was little
more than a myopic obsession with their autonomous space of language
and culture within the empire. Cultural nationalism as such certainly
failed to acknowledge translation as an ethical and political practice that
existed to be critical of colonial domination and to envision new ways of
relating to the other. What colonized intellectuals should do with trans-
lation is thus neither reject it as unequal exchange nor yearn for equal
exchange. The colonized should reconfigure translation in relation to the
other by refusing the idea of equal exchange in language. Translation
reconfigured as such is elevated to an ethical and political practice, thus
implying fundamental criticism of colonial domination. Put di}erently,
by disclosing the unethical nature of equal exchange and emphasizing
instead the asymmetry of ethics, translation reframed as an ethical and
political practice provides a radical criticism of colonial discourse that
works homologously with a model of translation based on equal exchange
and serves to propagate the idea of colonial domination as equal exchange
in a reciprocal relationship between colonizer and colonized.
The relationship between the self and the other in Levinasian eth-
ics should not be mistaken for the relationship with the other that is
dominant in the tradition of Western thought that Levinas identifies
as ontology.80 Although the ego is solidified through the erasure of the
otherness of the other in ontology, the self is vulnerable to the ethical
call from the other.81 In other words, whereas the ontological relation-
ship with the other of ontology legitimizes the ego by sacrificing the
alterity of the other, the other Levinas calls the self to face brings into
question the legitimacy of that self in the ethical relationship. Thus,
although the insistence on an ethical relationship between the colonized

70 / Treacherous Translation
and the colonizer entails a clear demarcation between the two, it should
not be regarded as a return to an old model of the Manichean relation-
ship of ontology between the colonized and the colonizer on which rests
both colonial domination and cultural nationalism. In other words, the
ethical relationship between the colonized and the colonizer resists the
constitution of the subjectivity of both the colonizer and the colonized
as premised on such essentialist foundations as ethnicity, language, tra-
dition, and culture. Not only does criticism of colonialism grounded in
Levinasian ethics summon the colonizer to be vulnerable to the colo-
nized’s accusation of colonial violence but it also reminds the colonized
of their responsibility to other colonized peoples as an other, existing
outside of the self ’s supposed national community bound by ethnicity,
language, tradition, and culture.
However, the unlimited obligation of the self to the other does not
mean that the colonized are as ethically culpable to the colonizer as
the latter is to the former because the colonizer is as much the other
to the colonized as the colonized are to the colonizer. The Levinasian
ethical relationship should not be mistaken for the equalization of ethical
responsibility between the colonizer and the colonized. Such an argu-
ment bolsters a theory of equal exchange that the critique of symmetrical
reciprocity disproves.82 Ethicality built on asymmetry requires the self to
be responsible for the other regardless of whether the other reciprocates
that care or not. The critique of equal exchange o}ered by the concept of
translation as a political and ethical practice thus does not o}er the colo-
nizer any excuses because it does not demand the same level of ethical
obligation from the colonized and the colonizer and instead vehemently
opposes any endeavor to dismiss the ethical obligation of the colonizer
toward the colonized. Such ethicality emphasizes the insolvency of colo-
nizers who forever fail to pay their debt to the people they have colonized.
The theory thus denounces any attempt to posit the colonial relationship
as reciprocally beneficial to both the colonizer and the colonized. The
purpose of a critique of colonialism grounded in ethics is to criticize
colonial discourse that relentlessly rehashes the logic of equal exchange
between imperial aggression and defense of civilization, colonial exploi-
tation and economic development, and free flow of capital and the spread
of modern ideas and values.

71
3. The Location of “Korean” Culture
Ch’oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature
in a Time of Transition
Fourteen years after Japanese colonialism had come to an end in Korea,
Ch’oe Chaesŏ contributed a regular column to the newspaper of Yonsei
University where he taught English literature. In the column, he noted
that his students had nicknamed him Reverend Dimmesdale, after the
character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, because he seemed
distant and hard to read.1 He insisted that the nickname, however, was
not apt because he did not share the sinister past of the novel’s character.
It is telling that, although his students only attributed the nickname to
his aloofness, he was quick to distance himself from Dimmesdale’s dark
history. But despite his protestations, Ch’oe had a past so haunting that he
once dolefully confessed that he had not seen a film since the Pacific War
because movie going was a part of the youth he had buried along with
his memories of the war.2 How should this maneuver of simultaneously
drawing attention to and distancing himself from the past be interpreted?
One answer can be found in the memoir of Yu Chino, a Korean intel-
lectual active on the Korean literary scene during the colonial period and a
member of the 1938 roundtable discussion on the Japanese-language stag-
ing of the Korean tale Ch’unhyangjŏn. Yu o}ered the following glimpse at
the haunting past Ch’oe wished to consign to oblivion. In December 1942,
Itō Norio, a thought prosecutor in Pusan, contacted me through a cer-
tain Mr. Ch’oe, who was the chief editor of a very influential literary
journal at that time, with an invitation that since it had been a while
he wanted to have dinner and talk over some bottles of Kanbotan,
the quality [rice] wine of [the southeastern city of ] Masan he bought
on his way to Kyŏngsŏng [the colonial-era name for Seoul]. Even
though the title “thought prosecutor” sounds threatening, Itō was
an old teacher of mine from college from whom I took an introduc-
tory law course one semester. Besides, although he was a thought

72 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
prosecutor, he had been demoted and transferred from Kyŏngsŏng to
Pusan because he was known as a man of liberal or gentle nature if
you wish. Therefore I accepted his invitation while wondering about
it. . . . As I suspected, what Itō wanted to discuss was politics. Ch’oe,
sitting next to him, expanded on what Itō said by asserting that the
time had come for intellectuals like us without any personal ambition
to consider the future of Koreans in the face of the current situation.
Obviously, Itō and Ch’oe had planned this meeting in advance. . . .
Mr. Chang Tŏksu stood up to leave, making an excuse that he had a
previous engagement. Apparently he made up the excuse in order to
escape. Ch’oe with an unpleasant look on his face grumbled “because
he is a big shot” while glaring at the back of Chang who had turned to
leave the room. Seizing my chance, I too stood up to leave. This time,
he sneered at my back as I left and said in a quite loud voice, “you’re a
big shot, too, aren’t you?”3
The “certain Ch’oe” in this anecdote was the same Ch’oe. In 1942, he was
the editor of Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), a Japanese-language
journal that was the only literary periodical still in print in colonial Korea
at the time this incident took place. At that time, Ch’oe was deeply involved
in various cultural and literary propaganda projects directed at promoting
the Japanese colonial policy of assimilation in Korea.4 In Yu’s account,
Ch’oe is depicted as an arrogant villain who pressed his fellow Korean
intellectuals to cooperate with Japanese colonialism against their will.
Ch’oe’s enthusiastic embrace of Japanese colonial domination in the
1940s has bewildered scholars of colonial-period Korean literature. Ch’oe
is credited with introducing the modern English literary criticism of T. E.
Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Herbert Read to Korea in the 1930s.
Ch’oe emphasized the importance of intellect in literary criticism and
argued that it was what unified the theories of these English literary crit-
ics despite discrepancies among their ideas. By applying Western literary
theories to his analysis of Korean literature, Ch’oe attempted to bring
the modernity he found in them to Korean literature. He believed that
the future of Korean culture depended on the successful adoption of the
Western cultural tradition, even though he considered the development
of Korean society to be lagging, and thus impeding the growth of literary
modernity.
Around 1940, Ch’oe began writing literary criticism that justified the
Japanese colonial policy of assimilation, which was epitomized by the
colonial slogan of the day “Homeland (i.e., Japan)– Korea as One Body”
(naisen ittai). His criticism positioned Korean literature as a subset of
Japanese literature, and he encouraged Korean writers and poets to

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 73
contribute to a Japanese national literature, or kokumin bungaku. Ch’oe
peppered his essays with the colonial ideology of assimilation, renounc-
ing the modernity that was being “overcome” by Japan and declaring
his loyalty to the Japanese state, even unto death. Thus in the eyes of
Korean literary historians, Ch’oe’s collaboration with the Japanese colo-
nial authorities was not only a betrayal of his people but also a traitorous
departure from his former advocacy of modernity and the intellect in
literary criticism.
The enigma of Ch’oe’s transformation from faith in the intellectual
rooted in the Western literary tradition to an embrace of the cultural
policy of Japanese colonialism makes his career a valuable window into
the ideological topography of intellectuals in the final stage of Japanese
colonialism’s policy of assimilation in Korea. Not only did Ch’oe o}er
one of the most systematic theoretical justifications of colonial ideology
in the realm of culture and literature in colonial Korea, but also he was
able to proselytize his position in the Japanese-language publication
Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), the only literary journal allowed
to remain in print by the early 1940s. By attempting to solve the enigma
of his conversion, I hope to gain insight into the view of the colonized
intellectual on collaboration.
More specifically, in this chapter, I closely read Ch’oe’s 1943 Japanese-
language book Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku (Korean Literature in a Time
of Transition),5 in which he set out to subsume Korean culture within
Japanese culture and to call on Korean writers and poets to produce a
national literature for Korean imperial subjects in Japanese that would
serve to raise national consciousness of the Japanese empire among
Koreans. I attempt to work through Ch’oe’s defense of the assimilation
policy of Japanese colonialism in Korea. The central chapters of Ch’oe’s
book pivot on his intellectual justification for positioning Korean litera-
ture as a subset of Japanese literature. Under the crust of his unabashed
enthusiasm for Japanese colonial dominance in Korea lie more nuanced
arguments for securing an autonomous space for Korean culture in the
face of the assimilation policy of Japanese colonialism. However, I do not
intend to rescue his writings from the sweeping denunciation of Korean
nationalists by stressing that ambivalence, nor is it my intent to privilege
ambivalence in Ch’oe’s defense of Japanese colonialism as characteristic
of the relationship between the colonized and colonizers or as the site
of resistance to colonialism as brilliantly conjured up from colonial dis-
course by Homi Bhabha in his The Location of Culture.6
Instead, my aim is to analyze how Ch’oe’s sincere intellectualism and

74 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
his experiences as a denizen of everyday life in colonial society led him to
collaborate with colonial domination. In doing so, I want to expose how
the quotidian was turned into a space for the production and reproduction
of colonial domination. I also pay attention to how his concept of history
contributed to developing his argument. Echoing the Japanese philoso-
pher Miki Kiyoshi, whose work was introduced into Korea by the Korean
intellectual Sŏ Insik, one of the regular contributors to Inmun P’yŏngnon
(Humanities Review), the Korean-language journal Ch’oe launched in
1939, Ch’oe argued that modernity originating in Europe had completed
its historical task and that the world had entered a new historical era in
which individualism and liberalism had rapidly become dysfunctional.7
He called for a paradigmatic transition in culture and literature to reflect
such a historical change. Ch’oe felt that the rise of totalitarianism and
the ongoing war forced Korean intellectuals to face up to the reality that
Koreans and the Japanese belonged to the same community formed by
historical destiny and would have to band together to survive the violent
worldwide conflict. He called for the establishment of a national litera-
ture to instill consciousness among Koreans of belonging to Japan.
Finally, by comparing Ch’oe’s critical essays on literature, culture,
and politics with his own translations, I examine the way in which the
Korean-language originals and the translations into Japanese address
a slightly di}erent readership. Such minuscule di}erences between
originals and translations, however, interrupt the transparent significa-
tion of such concepts as tradition, culture, Japan, and Korea, on which
Ch’oe based his arguments in the essays. The di}erence reveals that the
meanings of such concepts are undecidable in the Derridean sense. The
undecidability embedded in the significations of the concepts ultimately
disrupts Ch’oe’s discursive strategy, which aimed simultaneously to in-
clude Koreans in the category of the Japanese nation and to establish an
autonomous space for Korean culture within the empire of Japan.
In his reading of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida
observed that the French Enlightenment thinker described writing as
a subordinate, but necessary, supplement to speech because writing
partially restores what speech promises yet eventually fails to deliver.8
According to Derrida, the term “supplement” is presented in Rousseau’s
writings in such a way that its meaning is undecidable between plenti-
tude and deficiency, because a supplement simultaneously adds to and
substitutes for what it supplements. It adds to something that is deficient
to make it complete but it also fills in as a subaltern substitute for some-
thing that is already complete. Put di}erently, a supplement portends the

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 75
full presence of what it supplements, yet ironically it also marks the lack
of presence because presence depends on it to be complete. Thus, presence
can be present only by proxy.
The implications of the concept of supplementarity extend beyond
Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s works to his critique of Western meta-
physical thought, which, in his view, privileges presence. For instance,
the question about how a human being experiences the external world
lies at the center of the Western philosophical tradition. One major
response to the question postulates that the thing in itself can never be
directly accessed by the experiencing subject, and thus it is approach-
able only through its supplement, in other words, a representation of the
thing. The representation is less than the thing in itself. Nevertheless, it
is necessary because the thing in itself is not immediately available to the
experiencing subject. By filling in for the thing in itself, the representa-
tion presupposes the presence of the thing in itself. Accordingly, hier-
archy is embedded in the relationship between presence and its supple-
ment. Presence is deemed original, pure, natural, and essential whereas
a supplement is considered derivative, corrupt, artificial, and extraneous.
Nevertheless, as discussed earlier, presence is present only as the afteref-
fects of its supplement. The original, pure presence is always deferred.
Through his deliberations on supplementarity in Rousseau’s works,
Derrida demonstrated his reading strategy, which is what has been
branded deconstruction. It lays bare the ideology of what he termed tran-
scendental reading. Transcendental reading is premised on the assump-
tion that meaning can be exhaustively reduced to the transcendental
signified outside the text, be that the authorial intent, the author’s sub-
conscious, or the extratextual context in which the author was located.
The transcendental signified is indefinitely deferred, however, because,
in signification, one signifier is replaced with another signifier rather
than fixed onto the ultimate signified.
The notion of supplementarity manifests an occasion of undecidabil-
ity, the kernel of Derrida’s ethics and politics. As shown in the case of a
supplement, the undecidable pivots on the dynamics of certain opposi-
tions inherent in a text while simultaneously subverting the oppositional
dynamics because of double meanings. Undecidability does not merely
postulate the indefinite deferral of the transcendental signified. It also
demands that when reading a text, the reader must choose with great care
one possible meaning over another. Thus, instead of resulting in indeci-
sion, undecidability constitutes the very condition of the possibility of
making a decision. Unless a decision arises from the ordeal of undecid-

76 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
ability, it cannot be a genuine decision.9 In other words, undecidability
does not merely indicate the impossibility of meaning. On the contrary,
it presupposes that there must be multiple plausible meanings among
which the reader debates to make a genuine decision. Nevertheless, no
matter how legitimate the reader’s decision may be, the other possible
meanings, which the decision left out, still haunt and disrupt the seem-
ingly univocal signification of the text.
Needless to say, by engaging in a deconstructive reading of Ch’oe’s
texts, I do not deny the relevance of authorial intent and extratextual
context. Undecidability itself would not work unless legitimate meanings
were available through reading. Reading in turn cannot proceed with-
out recourse to the authorial intent and extratextual context. Invoking
Derrida’s concept of supplementarity, I call attention to the undecidability
inherent in Ch’oe’s texts that is highlighted by the di}erences between
the texts and his own translations of them. The undecidability merits
our attention because it destabilizes the univocal signification of such
concepts as culture, tradition, Japan, and Korea despite Ch’oe’s authorial
intention to fix them onto stable meanings.
Before venturing into examining Ch’oe writings on literature, culture,
and politics, however, I will trace his early life to situate him and his
thought in the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea.
a portr a it of the coloni al intellectual as
a young m an
In 1943, Ch’oe wrote an essay that can be interpreted as a vindication
of Korean intellectuals’ lack of enthusiasm toward mobilizing behind
Japanese colonial policies. In the essay, Ch’oe admitted that intellectuals
have a tendency to skip political gatherings and, he added, when they do
attend, they are always late. In addition, he contended that intellectuals
are likely to argue at meetings, and even if they agree, they never fail
to complain. However, Ch’oe attributed this uncooperative attitude to
the intellectual temperament, ignoring any possibility that their actions
might represent passive but deliberate resistance to colonial rule.10 He
reasoned instead that the temperament stems from intellectuals’ pursuit
of high principles and values that transcend the mundane life of ordinary
people and their desire to help create a national culture for future genera-
tions. Although asserting that culture can be produced only when nation
and art are perfectly harmonized, he insisted that intellectuals’ laggard
response to politics should not be deemed a remnant of liberalism, which

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 77
he viewed as an obsolete ideology of the past. Instead, he implored critics
to encourage the good side of men of letters, in other words, that which
produces culture. Thus, Ch’oe asked for tolerance toward intellectuals
who failed to enthusiastically cooperate with the colonial authorities.11
Certainly, Ch’oe recommended that Korean intellectuals be more coop-
erative with the colonial authority and not support any political resis-
tance. However, because Koreans, intellectuals or not, were forcibly
mobilized for Japanese war e}orts and every hint of political dissension
was ruthlessly suppressed, Ch’oe’s essay can be read as a gesture to pro-
tect his fellow Korean intellectuals from retaliation by Japanese colonial
authorities. A rather sympathetic reading of this essay might allow for a
shadow of the martyr in Ch’oe bearing the yoke of collaboration on his
shoulders while saving other Korean intellectuals from the disgraceful
task imposed on them by the Japanese colonial authority. In this part of
the chapter, I will explicate this complicated mental terrain by piecing
together anecdotes, personal memoirs, and essays by and about Ch’oe,
as an example of the plight of intellectuals stranded in colonial society.
Ch’oe was born in 1908 in Haeju, Hwanghaedo, in the northwestern
part of Korea. His father was a wealthy businessman-turned-farmer,
and his family seems to have been more than a£uent. It is said that his
father’s farm was so vast that the noise of the household never reached
any of its neighbors.12 He went to Keijō, present-day Seoul, to attend
Keijō Second Higher Common School and, in 1926, he matriculated at the
top of his class, bound for the Faculty of Letters at Keijō Imperial Univer-
sity.13 Finishing its requirements in 1928, he entered the Department of
English Literature at the university. Academically active and ambitious,
he regularly wrote articles for the English department bulletin. Its editor-
in-chief was Satō Kiyoshi, a Japanese professor in the English depart-
ment. Ch’oe became one of Satō’s most beloved disciples.
While at college, Ch’oe lived in a Japanese boarding house, made
friends with Japanese classmates, and spoke in Japanese. He rarely spoke
Korean on campus.14 His only Korean friend, Hyŏn Yŏngnam (who
later changed his name to Yŏngsŏp), was known to fellow students as
an anarchist.15 Ch’oe was well-known for his fluent English but he was
extremely unpopular among Korean students because he socialized only
with Japanese students and not with them. Once, some Korean students
ganged up on him because of his “pro-Japanese” attitude, but it is not
clear whether those “pro-Japanese” tendencies extended to a political alle-
giance. In the preface to his Japanese language-book Korean Literature
in a Time of Transition, he wrote that since childhood he had held great

78 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
a}ection for Japanese culture including the language, the Japanese-style
room (washitsu), and the literature of the Meiji period, and that he had
made many friends among the Japanese people. He confessed, however,
that he considered his a}ection for Japan to be a matter of personal taste
and not related to the Japanese state. He made this confession in the con-
text of emphasizing the necessity for Koreans to embrace the Japanese
state in the face of the historical transition following the outbreak of the
Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Taking into account the context of the book,
one might legitimately suspect that Ch’oe intentionally depicted his
a}ection for Japan as apolitical to stress the contrast between a private,
personal taste for Japanese culture and a public, political allegiance to
the Japanese state. Such autobiographical statements must be subjected
to examination against other relevant documents. An excerpt from the
memoirs of one of Ch’oe’s teachers at college, Takagi Ichinosuke, can
serve that purpose. A prominent Japanese scholar of Japanese literature
who taught at Keijō Imperial University for 14 years, from 1926 to 1940,
Takagi met Ch’oe’s college professor, Satō, when they studied in England
on Japanese government fellowships, and the two remained friends.
Knowing both Satō and Ch’oe, Takagi was close enough to the latter to
witness this comic– tragic scene of the colonized man:
[T]here was a student named Ch’oe Chaesŏ who was studying English
literature. . . . After graduating, he became a lecturer and visited me
quite often. While at college, he was regarded as pro– Japanese so
much so that once he was even beaten up by other Korean students.
However there was an incident during the New Year holidays when
he came to my place late at night with an awful look on his face and
with two or three bottles of beer dangling from his hands. He made
threatening remarks like “no matter how much you professors brag
about it, you cannot take away our Korean soul” and stomped out.16
What stands out in this latter anecdote is the sudden surge of nationalis-
tic feeling from a young man whose previous sentiments had strayed the
opposite way. Aided by alcohol, he may have been pouring out inner feel-
ings that he had repressed while speaking only Japanese, socializing only
with Japanese students, and making himself the most beloved disciple
of the Japanese professor, while rarely befriending and therefore being
detested by other Korean students.17 However what is more relevant to
our discussion is that Ch’oe’s relationship with Japan was anything but
transparent.
An essay that Ch’oe wrote in 1940 on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man o}ers some clues about what lay behind his a}ec-

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 79
tion for Japan and his aloofness from Korea.18 Ch’oe calls attention to the
protagonist Stephen Dedalus’s alienation from his fellow students, who
do not understand his cynicism about Irish nationalism and his ambiva-
lent attitude toward English culture. The resentment of the students is
succinctly summed up by the question that Stephen is asked by a class-
mate named Davin, which Ch’oe quotes in his review: “Are you Irish at
all?”19 This scene in the novel is superimposed on an autobiographical
anecdote of Ch’oe being harassed by other Korean students in college for
his lack of nationalistic zeal and for his a}ection for the Japanese culture
and language. Ch’oe reasons that Stephen has to escape from parochial
Irish culture and tradition to liberate the artist within. Ch’oe sees himself
speaking for his own situation as well as for Stephen’s. In other words,
Korean tradition is an impediment to the cultivation of his artistic taste
and Japanese language and culture are its vehicles.
Ch’oe’s attitude toward Japan was too complicated to identify him as
pro– Japanese if “pro– Japanese” carries political implications. My main
concern, however, is not to defend Ch’oe from accusations that he was
politically pro– Japanese starting in his college years. Ch’oe must have
noticed that his personal taste for the colonizer’s culture could not be
dissociated easily from its political implications by his fellow colonized.
Further more, if he identified with Stephen, whom Joyce is believed to
have modeled on himself, his later actions were quite the opposite
of those of Joyce. Although Joyce wrote in English, as Ch’oe wrote in
Japanese, Joyce did not choose English literature over Irish literature
or English over Gaelic, nor did he subsume Irish literature within Eng-
lish literature. Instead, he dismantled the putative unity of English, the
colonizer’s language, by hybridizing it with a variety of languages, as he
did in Finnegans Wake. In other words, Joyce aimed to uproot English
culture.20 Ch’oe would harshly criticize such an uprooting as a negative
characteristic of cosmopolitanism when defending Japanese colonial
domination.
After his graduation from university, Ch’oe was forced to face the
reality of colonial society in which the colonized were not only di}er-
entiated from the colonizers but also discriminated against, regardless
of the extent to which they had accepted the colonizers’ culture. Many
years later he still recollected with bitterness how frustrated he was by
the unfairness of colonial society, in which Japanese students with less
talent easily moved ahead of him in society even though he had been
always at the top of his class. This unfair treatment undoubtedly took
place during his employment at the Keijō Imperial University. The schol-

80 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
arly life of teaching and academic writing was his first passion.21 Ch’oe
entered graduate school following his graduation from college in 1931 and
was appointed lecturer in English at the university in 1933. He was one
of the first graduates of the university to attain a teaching position there
since its foundation in 1924. However, Ch’oe failed to win a permanent
position and, in 1934, he moved to the Keijō College of Law, a government
general-run school for bureaucrats, to teach English.22 It was impossible
at that time for Koreans to secure permanent teaching positions at Keijō
Imperial University.23
Ch’oe’s amicable relationship with his mentor, Satō, continued de –
spite his failure to attain a position at Keijō Imperial University. With
help from Satō, Ch’oe ventured into the Japanese intellectual world in
December 1934 by publishing an article introducing the literary criticism
of T. E. Hulme in the prominent Japanese journal Shisō (Thought). Ch’oe
was, noted a postscript from the editor, the first Korean contributor to the
journal in its more than 13-year history.24 The following month, another
article by Ch’oe, on the poetry criticism of John Dennis, appeared in one
of the leading Japanese academic journals Eibungaku Kenkyū (Studies in
English Literature). In other lectures and writings over the next several
years, he introduced the literary criticism of Eliot, Richards, and Read as
well as Wyndham Lewis to Korea.25 His choices were eclectic, ranging
from Hulme’s neoclassical modernism to Read’s psychoanalytical inter-
pretation, but Ch’oe found a common thread in their emphasis on the
importance of the intellect in criticism, and he lumped them together
under what he called intellectualism (chujijuŭi in Korean; shuchishugi in
Japanese).26
Ch’oe resigned from teaching in 1936 and started a publishing house
that would become known for publishing the works of Korean writers as
well as translations of such foreign novels as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth
(1931).27 Around the same time, he started writing reviews of Korean
literary works. As he seldom spoke Korean at college and his literary
theories were influenced by English critics, his writing reviews of Korean
works marked a significant shift. Hyŏn mistakenly described him around
this time as having been influenced by nationalism and socialism, but
Hyŏn must have mistaken Ch’oe’s emphasis on tradition and realism
in his criticism of Korean literature for sympathy for nationalism and
socialism.28 In the late 1930s, Ch’oe came to emphasize the importance
of morality in literary criticism. Drawing on Read, he argued that moral-
ity was the intuitive understanding of values through the intellect.29 By
stressing the importance of these two elements, he attempted to “restore

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 81
judgment” to the field of literary criticism: It is necessary, he argued,
to call for a literary criticism that would encourage literature capable
of providing order for man in a chaotic world. He posited that intellect
should hinge on (Western) cultural tradition and stressed that literature
should be anchored in the living and historical experience of the people
(minjung). He further argued that the writers should recognize that they
are members of the community of the people, not isolated individuals.
As discussed later, Ch’oe’s emphasis on the living and historical experi-
ence of the people would later turn into a depoliticization of everyday
life and mythification of history when he argued for the integration of
Korean culture and literature into those of Japan. In any case, it should
be pointed out that what Ch’oe meant by cultural tradition in this context
was the European culture that had produced the Western men of letters
he addressed in his critical writing.
Thus, as briefly mentioned in the preceding chapter, Ch’oe was skepti-
cal about Korean intellectuals’ own surge of interest in Korean cultural
tradition during the 1930s. It was widely noted that Korean literary
criticism fell into stagnation after the decline of the Proletarian literature
movement, the wellspring of Korean literary criticism in the late 1920s
and early 1930s, and, as discussed in the previous chapter, two major
Korean-language newspapers, Chosŏn Ilbo (Korea Daily) and Tong-A Ilbo
(East Asia Daily), initiated a call to reevaluate Korean cultural tradition.30
That call was welcomed by intellectuals well beyond the ranks of conser-
vative nationalists, but Ch’oe warned that such a revival would degenerate
into an obsession with regressive tastes and their irrational reactionary
implications. In particular, he pointed out that ancient treasures and
literature alone could not constitute culture. To him, the issue was how
Korean tradition could be made to contribute to the development of mod-
ern culture in contemporary Korea and eventually to world culture.31 He
believed that contemporary Korean culture should also be anchored in
Western cultural traditions, whether Korean traditionalists liked it or not.
In a similar vein, he was critical of Yi T’aejun and Chŏng Chiyong, who
claimed to value Korean and “Oriental” sentiments over modern intellect
in literature.32 Ch’oe’s skepticism about unreflective traditionalism should
be seen in the context of his criticism about European totalitarianism,
which he saw as based on regressive ethnic nationalism. He reasoned
that the most important issue for European intellectuals of the day was
how to defend the culture of Shakespeare and Goethe from the politically
inspired barbarism that was driving intellectuals into exile and destroy-
ing cultural riches crystallized over centuries of strife and wisdom.

82 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
In 1939, Ch’oe founded a Korean-language literary journal called
Inmun P’yŏngnon (Humanities Review), which soon became one of
the most influential journals for intellectuals in Korea. He served as
editor-in-chief and opened the journal to former socialists such as Kim
Namch’ŏn, Im Hwa, and Yi Wŏnjo, who had gone through the infamous
process of tenkō (ideological conversion) and to a group of intellectuals
commonly known as the “philosophy of history” critics, including Sŏ
Insik, Sin Namchŏl, Kim Osŏng, and Pak Ch’iu. By o}ering a new way to
look at the relationship between Korea and Japan, the “philosophy of his-
tory” critics left a distinct mark on the mindset of Korean intellectuals in
the late stages of Japanese colonial rule. Influenced by the Kyōto School
conceptualization of world history promoted by Miki, Kōsaka Masaaki,
and Kōyama Iwao, these Korean philosophers called for their countrymen
to join Japan in “overcoming modernity,” which, they saw, was fading out
after the completion of its historical task. They welcomed the anticolonial
and pro– Asian aspects of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere discourse as a significant challenge to Euro-American hegemony
over the world. As examined further below, Ch’oe grounded his justi-
fication for Japanese colonial domination in the theoretical foundation
o}ered by the “philosophy of history” critics.
In 1940, Ch’oe himself started advocating Japanese colonialism in his
journal. In those writings, he turned sharply away from his previous posi-
tion stressing the significance of the intellect in literary criticism and the
importance of European cultural tradition as the foundation of Korean
cultural development. In 1943, he published the book that has been read
in postliberation Korea as undisputable evidence of his traitorous col-
laboration with Japanese colonialism. A collection of literary criticism
written in Japanese, Korean Literature in a Time of Transition was Ch’oe’s
justification for the assimilation of Korean literature into Japanese litera-
ture. This treatise would serve to condemn him to self-imposed silence
for 10 years after the liberation of Korea and to the lifelong stigma of
having been a pro– Japanese traitor.33
constr a ined by history, tamed by ev ery day life:
korean liter ature in a time of tr ansition
As mentioned above, in Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, Ch’oe
called for the establishment of a national literature, which would incul-
cate Koreans with the Japanese national consciousness. What is most
conspicuous about Ch’oe’s discussion is that his conceptualization of a

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 83
national consciousness did not rest on a primordial community of com-
mon blood. He emphasized that an awareness of common blood or of
a community of everyday life alone is inadequate to produce literature
because it transmits no value system that can infuse the creative spirit
of the writer with concrete meanings and content.34 He implied that
national consciousness is not a feeling of belonging that stems from a
primordial folk community but rather a sense of belonging to the people
of a nation (kokumin) consciously mediated by the state (kokka). It goes
without saying that to include Koreans in the category of the Japanese
nation, Ch’oe, like other ideologues of “Japan– Korea as one body,” had no
choice but to emphasize that the notion of a nation should not be based
on folk or ethnicity.
To understand his argument, it is necessary to clarify how Ch’oe
defined national literature. Under total mobilization (kōdo kokubō taisei,
literally “advanced national defense system”), the task of literature was
to unify the nation and raise national morale. Japanese writers naturally
subscribed to this theory when war broke out, but this had not been the
case in Korea, which, Ch’oe argued, was handicapped by the mental-
ity that national literature served only to instill a feeling of primordial
community based on ethnicity or the folk (minzoku).35 The Japanese, of
course, automatically had such a sense of community as members of
the Japanese ethnicity, but the task at hand, according to Ch’oe, was to
awaken Koreans from that folk feeling of Korean nationalism to the real-
ity that they were now subjects of the Japanese state. National literature
was to serve that purpose.36
Ch’oe demanded that Korean men of letters should simultaneously
write about Korea old and new; study Korean goodness, beauty, and sad-
ness; and maintain Korean cultural particularity as part of the Japanese
nation. It would not be possible for great national literature to be pro-
duced by the mere shallow impulses of discarding Korean tradition to
bring alive the slogan of “Japan– Korea as one body.” More was required.37
Ch’oe next tackled the debate over the use of “local color” by Korean
writers. He argued that it is natural they do so in their creative writing,
but he cautioned that emphasis on the particularity of Korea should not
be abused. He underlined that Korean writers should not blindly imi-
tate their Japanese counterparts in depicting the urban culture of Tokyo
because blind imitation would result in degeneration of culture as a
whole.38 The future of Japanese culture should be sought in the total-
ity of cultures rooted in each locality and should emerge from actual
life in, and demands of, localities as they were becoming unified by the

84 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
Japanese spirit.39 In that context and that context only could local color
and culture make a meaningful contribution to national literature, but
he warned that should local color overstep its boundaries and pursue the
status of an independent entity, it would turn into an ideology of cultural
independence, which, in Ch’oe’s view, must be avoided at all costs. Love of
a home province could be elevated to patriotism, but, should it grow out
of bounds, it could undermine the balance of the whole. By falling into
sentimentalism, it could become political and no longer in the realm of
literature or culture. He warned that even if a writer were not using local
color to fan an ideology of independence among Koreans, readers might
interpret the work politically.40
Ch’oe’s objective in his book, thus, can be summed up as positioning
Korean literature and culture within the literature and culture of Japan.
More than simply parroting the slogan “Japan– Korea as one body,” he
was locating a historical necessity arising not only in Japan but also in
Europe for subsuming Korean culture within Japanese culture. The rise
of such totalitarian movements as fascism and Nazism had sent the world
into a seismic transition.41 The old values of individualism, rationalism,
and liberalism rapidly had become impotent in the face of the ontological
conditions of human beings bound by nationality and ethnicity. Korean
intellectuals were forced by worldwide historical change to realize that
to survive the violent struggles among nation states, they did not have
any choice but to embrace Japan as the state to which they belonged
and to position themselves as a part of the Japanese nation. Thus, it was
Ch’oe’s analysis of historical developments and not ambition or cowering
capitulation that led him to embrace Japanese domination in Asia. In that
regard, it is noteworthy that Ch’oe believed an individual should sincerely
embrace the realities of daily life rather than subsisting on the abstract
ideals of socialism and liberalism, which he saw as the two aspects of
cosmopolitanism that denied the essential importance of an individual’s
identity as part of nation and state.42 Ch’oe regarded the rise of fascism
and Nazism and the ensuing war in Europe and Asia as historical devel-
opments that made liberalism and individualism untenable.43 Thus, he
believed the world demanded a new intellectual framework to grapple
with the turmoil of the 20th century. He assailed rationalism, liberal-
ism, and individualism as the worldview of modernity, which o}ered no
intellectual guidance for coping with the raging war that was ruthlessly
consuming lives and the cultural achievements of humanity.
Ch’oe was not the only thinker critical of modernity in Korea during
the late 1930s and the early 1940s. The “philosophy of history” critics,

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 85
including Sŏ Insik, Sin Namchŏl, Kim Osŏng, and Pak Ch’iu, were draw-
ing on the ideas of younger philosophers of the Kyōto School, such as
Miki, Kōsaka, and Kōyama, to attempt to dethrone Europe from its posi-
tion at the center of world historical development.44 As mentioned earlier,
it was Ch’oe who opened the pages of his journal Inmun P’yŏngnon to
the Korean philosophy of history critics and thus provided them with a
venue for publishing their ideas in the late 1930s. Like the Kyōto School
philosophers, they criticized liberalism, rationalism, and capitalism and
argued that the world crisis had been brought about by the rise of fas-
cism, the emergence of the philosophy of life (lebensphilosophie), and the
worldwide economic depression that had shown these European-derived
dogmas to be bankrupt.45 They saw themselves attempting to come up
with a new world view to replace old intellectual systems. Ch’oe’s criti-
cal writings in defense of Japanese colonialism drew on many of their
concerns and problematics.
In “an age of total war in which nations enlisted their entire military,
economic, and technological capacity to mobilize for survival,” Ch’oe con-
sidered it futile to preach that human reason was shared equally among
all individuals regardless of nationality.46 He saw history as unfolding
according to its own laws. Human beings were not active agents who
created history but rather passive participants responding to historical
changes that proceeded according to their own laws. Thus, he posited
history not as collective events actively made by human beings but as an
irrevocable force that moved on its own terms. In short, to Ch’oe, human
beings could not actively change history for their own good but rather
were relegated to passively responding to its vicissitudes. Individual
human beings could not contest history; they had only to accept it. As
the early 20th century was the period in which only the strong would
survive, Koreans should cast their lot with a strong state rather than
struggle to become independent. In fact, Koreans already belonged to a
strong state, Japan, whether they liked it or not. Facing up to the fate
already determined by history, the individual’s task was to live with sin-
cerity (seijitsu) under the conditions given. Living sincerely thus involved
adaptation to the changing currents of history.
The analysis of history at the root of Ch’oe’s argument was that writers
should delve into the everyday life of the nation (kokumin) and ground
literature in the concreteness of everyday life.47 To some extent, this
emphasis was a generic trait of the literature of ideological conversion
(tenkō bungaku) produced by former leftists in Japan. Such goals of social-
ism as class equality and liberation from oppression were deemed too

86 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
abstract to help ordinary people improve their everyday lives. Socialist
activists were depicted as incompetents who could not even feed their
own families, let alone save society from capitalist tyranny. For example,
in his 1937 novel Seikatsu no Tankyū (Quest for Life), Shimaki Kensaku
described a protagonist who is weary of the abstract ideals his colleagues
spouted at college and is literally sick with a disease that he contracted
in Tokyo.48 As he commits himself to working on his father’s farm in
his hometown, he not only cures his disease but also discovers the true
meaning of life. Shimaki’s novel was very popular among readers. This
tends to validate the thinking of the postwar critic Yoshimoto Takaaki,
who has argued that the mass recantations of leftist intellectuals in the
1930s had more to do with their dawning awareness of their alienation
from the masses than with state coercion. Yoshimoto contended that the
mass conversion was inevitable because the leftists’ dogmatic ideology
had no applications to the everyday life of the people.49 In other words,
from Yoshimoto’s perspective, the separation of socialist ideas from the
life of the people mirrored the gulf between leftist intellectuals and the
masses.50
Japanese conversion literature was not the only intellectual strain of
the day that prioritized the concrete reality of everyday life. The contrast
between the abstract ideals of leftist intellectuals and the concreteness
of everyday life also constituted an important motif in the writer Kim
Namch’ŏn’s literary works in colonial Korea. Kim wrote stories describ-
ing leftist intellectuals’ ineptitude at everyday life and their often frus-
trated endeavors to adapt to the real world.51 Ch’oe praised one of Kim’s
short stories “Tŭngpul” (Lantern) for its prioritization of the concreteness
of everyday life.52 Ch’oe paid special attention to the main character’s
dedication to his family. The main character once demanded sacrifice
from his family for his selfish literary pursuits. But later he realizes that
he should give up his nebulous idea of literature for his family. Ch’oe
stressed that the short story describes the journey of the main character
from the abstract to the concrete, and argues that beauty is to be found
in the daily life of a practical man. Introducing a scene in which the main
character concludes a bedtime story for his children by saying, “I want to
live,” Ch’oe defined the main character as a man who exhausted his youth
with abstractness, ideology, and rationalism but has now awakened to
the importance of everyday life in his business, home, and family life. 53
Ch’oe argued that the arena of the quotidian should be depoliticized.
He urged other colonial intellectuals who did little while talking much
about Korean independence or socialist ideals to find and work on their

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 87
everyday lives. Thus Ch’oe posited everyday life as an apolitical space
that the politics of resistance could not infiltrate.54 Posing everyday life
as an apolitical space was itself reactionary politics, however, because it
neutralized any attempt to act out opposition to colonialism in everyday
life. What the colonial intellectual was allowed to do instead was to carve
out an autonomous space for Korean culture and literature within the
Japanese empire in return for collaborating with the Japanese colonial
authorities.
In Ch’oe’s thinking, the space of everyday life was rigidly territo-
rialized as a national space in which individuals live ordinary lives as
members of their nation. While advising writers on how to write national
literature that expresses the feelings of the nation, Ch’oe insisted that
by breaking away from interiority, they enter “the everyday life of the
nation” (kokumin seikatsu). He argued that only in the everyday life of the
nation can writers empathize with their nation and learn what national
sentiment is. Only by so doing can they write national literature, accord-
ing to Ch’oe.55
the ambiguous location of “korean” culture
There are a number of contrasting and even contradictory polarities
within Ch’oe’s argument that distract the reader from looking directly
at his idea of collaboration. As explicated above, Ch’oe called on Korean
writers and poets to produce national literature to facilitate the assimi-
lation of Korean culture into Japanese culture, but at the same time he
argued that Korean literature and culture should remain distinct from
Japanese culture and literature. He stressed an absolute belief in the
Japanese spirit while often grounding his arguments in rational explana-
tions of culture, literature, and the economy. He argued for a national
literature to raise Koreans’ political consciousness within the Japanese
nation. Simultaneously, he set out to defend the autonomy of culture
from politics by arguing that national literature should not degenerate
into mere propaganda, and he insisted that rigid restrictions should not
constrain literary creation. Finally, even though his focus was on Korea
and Japan, he argued that his recipe for national literature was applicable
to other nations because he saw the historical necessity for national liter-
atures to emerge from historical events in Europe as well as in East Asia.
Those polarities, however, actually maintain the consistency of his
arguments. The particularity of Korean culture and literature must be
stressed exactly because it was being forcibly assimilated into Japanese

88 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
culture and literature. He accepted the Japanese spirit on blind faith as a
logical leap to compensate for the incompatibility between the colonial
reality that Koreans were discriminated against and his demand that
Koreans should nonetheless embrace Japan as their state (kokka). Writers
and poets had no other choice but to cooperate with the Japanese colonial
authorities, he posited, because their collaboration would be the only way
to preserve a semblance of cultural autonomy from further encroach-
ment by the colonial state. Ch’oe accepted that literature inevitably needs
external support, just as “dahlia plants in the garden require staking.” In
this time of transition, what Korean literature needed most was strong
support from outside. Cooperation with the colonial government was a
way to achieve the strong external support for Korean literature to sur-
vive.56 At the same time, Ch’oe proudly emphasized that his Japanese-
language journal Kokumin Bungaku was the only literary journal being
published in Korea at the time.57
In other words, the existence of the polarities in Ch’oe’s writings attest
to the compromises he had to make to defend the autonomy of Korean
culture without politically opposing Japanese colonialism. At the core of
his argument beneath the polarities was the idea that a national literature
should be established to raise Japanese national consciousness among
Koreans, but it is important to remember that the national consciousness
he envisioned is not based on a feeling of belonging to a primordial com-
munity of folk, ethnicity, or race, but rather is based on the conscious-
ness that one’s fate is contingent on that of the state.58 Consequently, the
national literature he urged Korean writers and poets to produce was
literature that enabled Korean readers to realize that they were subjects
of the Japanese state and that both Koreans and the Japanese are in the
same community of destiny because both belong to the Japanese state.
However, Ch’oe not only urged Korean writers and poets to adapt to
political change but also implored the Japanese to accept Korea as an
integral part of Japan and Korean literature as Japanese literature.
Despite his e}orts to position Koreans firmly within the Japanese state,
Ch’oe believed he could preserve the particularity of Korean literature
within the category of Japanese literature. For example, he did not hesi-
tate even for a second to exclude the Japanese writer Tanaka Hidemitsu’s
work from Korean literature, even though Tanaka lived in Korea.59 For
Ch’oe, Tanaka’s works were not connected to Korea because they have
nothing to do with the lives of Koreans in Korea.60 This rigid demarca-
tion of Korean literature from that literature produced by Japanese writ-
ers coexists with his exhortation to subsume the former within the lat-

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 89
ter. It is not possible to understand Ch’oe’s idea of collaboration without
grasping this complexity.
At the center of Ch’oe’s writings is the double desire of making Korea
a part of Japan while simultaneously maintaining its autonomy. His
discourse is marked by ambivalence about the location of Korean cul-
ture within the Japanese empire. In that sense, it parallels what Homi
Bhabha has designated as the ambivalence of colonial discourse, deriving
from its strategy of simultaneously disowning and acknowledging dif-
ference between the colonizers and the colonized. According to Bhabha,
colonial discourse is dependent on fixing racial, cultural, and historical
di}erence onto the colonized and then stigmatizing the resulting iden-
tity as inferior to that of the colonizer. At the same time, the colonizer
professes that the colonized can be improved and civilized like him. Out
of this ambivalence, Bhabha argues, emerges the “mimic man” who is
recognizably the same but still di}erent. In Bhabha’s theorization, “the
mimic man, by virtue of his partial and never complete representation,
rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence.”61
Following Bhabha’s framing of colonial discourse, one may view Ch’oe
as an example of the mimic man, the colonial subject who is the same
as, but still di}erent from, the Japanese. A mimic man consciously and
unconsciously spoke, wrote, read, thought, and behaved like a Japanese
intellectual but was not Japanese. The ambivalence of Ch’oe as a mimic
man undermines the fixed identities of the colonized and the colonizers
on which the colonial regime leans, according to Bhabha. However, as
should be clear by now, the ambivalence Bhabha has located in colonial
discourse is not identical to the ambivalence in Ch’oe’s writings. It is not
the colonizer’s fixating gaze but the colonized intellectual’s own desire
to be on the side of, but at the same time, to di}erentiate himself from,
the colonizer that gives rise to ambivalence. I acknowledge that this colo-
nized’s double desire can be seen as a refracted form of the colonizer’s
gaze. Nevertheless, I insist that it is necessary to hold on to the di}erence
between the colonized’s double desire and the colonizer’s gaze to gain
insight into the colonized’s acceptance of colonial dominance. As noted in
the preface, I am not interested in appropriating this ambivalence as a site
of resistance that subverts the Manichean world view on which colonial
dominance depends. I intend rather to unravel Ch’oe’s idea of collabo-
ration from its entanglement with the unabashedly conformist rhetoric
he used in his writings in defense of Japanese colonial domination and
thus to map out the topography of the colonized intellectual’s approach
to colonial reality.

90 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
Ch’oe’s project can be simply put as locating Korean culture as a subset
of the culture of Japan. The end result that he aimed for was the demar-
cation of Korean culture as an autonomous space within the culture of
the Japanese empire. In a way, Ch’oe inverted the strategy of colonial
discourse that simultaneously excludes and includes the colonized. It is
the colonized who di}erentiates his or her culture from the colonizer’s
while locating it within a new concept of culture of the empire, inclusive
of both cultures of the colonized and the colonizer. In this context, it is
important to remember that for Ch’oe, Japanese culture is not the culture
of the Japanese folk (Nihon minzoku) but rather that of “Japan as a state”
(kokka to shite no Nihon). If a literary work is identified as a part of Korean
literature, then it is both Korean and Japanese because Korean culture is a
subset of Japanese culture. However the converse is not necessarily true.
Even if a literary work is recognized as Japanese literature, it is not neces-
sarily regarded as Korean literature because Japanese literature includes
all of the di}erent literatures produced within the Japanese empire.
In sum, Ch’oe deprived Japan, the ethnic community interpellated as
Nihon (or Yamato) minzoku, of its centrality and set out to “provincialize”
(in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term) the Japanese folk as a part of the totality
called the Japanese nation (Nihon kokumin), a newly configured political
community that was open not only to Koreans and Japanese but also to
Taiwanese and any other people within the Japanese empire. Using such
reasoning, Ch’oe rejected Korean imitations of Tokyo culture because,
to him, Tokyo designated nothing more than a specific locality within
the Japanese empire. Its putative centrality as the capital of the Japanese
empire did not override the particularity belonging to Korea. Moreover,
by arguing that Korean literature was more than just one kind of local
literature within Japan, akin to that from Hokkaidō or Kyūshū, Ch’oe
insisted that it should be granted the special autonomy proper to its
long literary tradition independent from Japan.62 Opposing those who
put Korean literature on a par with Kyūshū or Hokkaidō literature,
Ch’oe asserted that Korean literature had more local particularity than
its Kyūshū, Tōhoku, or even Taiwanese counterpart. He contended that
not only was Korea di}erent from Japan in terms of climate, character,
and way of thinking but also it had a long literary tradition of its own.
Moreover, he argued, it had di}erent problems and demands. He con-
tended that because Korean literature dealt with the reality and senti-
ments of everyday life in Korea, it would continue to be quite di}erent
from Japanese literature. He suggested it should occupy a position like
that of Scottish literature in relation to English literature. Scottish lit-

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 91
erature is a part of English literature but it has its own character and has
made many contributions to the latter. In contrast, Ch’oe pointed out that
Irish literature, although it is largely written in English, has an anti–
British cast. He insisted that Korean literature should not follow the Irish
lead in relation to Japan.63
Never allowing himself to cry in despair that Korean literature was
doomed to extinction or complete absorption into Japanese literature,
Ch’oe proposed another vision: By retaining the originality of their
own literature, Koreans should contribute to the construction of a new
Japanese culture.64
The title of his book, however, poignantly betrays the aporia that
haunts Ch’oe’s view of the new Japanese national culture and literature
as inclusive of local cultures and literatures within the empire. Ch’oe did
not title his book Tenkanki no Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature in a
Time of Transition) but rather Tenkanki no Chōsen Bungaku (Korean Lit-
erature in a Time of Transition). It goes without saying that without the
modifier Chōsen (Korean), bungaku (literature) would be interpreted as
Nihon bungaku (Japanese literature). To see the point, it su�ces to recall
that the Japanese critic Aono Suekichi had published a book of literary
criticism titled Tenkanki no Bungaku (Literature in a Time of Transi-
tion) in 1927.65 Certainly, the leftist politics that inspired Aono’s literary
criticism were in direct opposition to what Ch’oe expressed in Korean
Literature in a Time of Transition, which stressed unwavering loyalty to
the Japanese state.66 However, I call attention to the fact that Aono did
not modify the title of his book with the adjective “Japanese.” In contrast,
Ch’oe did need to specify which literature he was discussing. Otherwise,
readers could not gauge from the title that the book (which was, after
all, written in Japanese) was about Korean literature. One might rightly
say that the Japaneseness of literature in Aono’s book did not have to be
specified because the book was delivered in Japanese. This instant cor-
relation between the Japanese language and Japanese literature already
points to the insurmountable di�culty that Ch’oe had to face in placing
Korean literature within the sphere of Japanese literature. Korean litera-
ture could hardly be dissociated from the Korean language. As long as
the Korean language was perceived to be distinct from, but on a par with,
the Japanese language, the integration of Korean literature into Japanese
literature could not be accomplished. Conversely, even though “Japanese
literature” in this context referred to the literature of the Japanese nation
(kokumin) rather the literature of the Japanese folk (minzoku), it still
retained the connotation of the literature of the Japanese folk.

92 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
Thus, national language was central to establishing a relationship
between Korean and Japanese literature in the framework of national
literature. Although Ch’oe advocated the unique local color of Korean
culture and literature within the culture of the Japanese empire, as dis-
cussed earlier, he expressed an unequivocal view that Japanese should
replace Korean gradually as the medium of literary expression in colonial
Korea.67 If Japanese took the place of Korean as the literary language for
Korean writers and poets, what would make Korean literature distinct
from general literature— that is, Japanese literature— which was general-
ized enough not to carry any modifier, as in Aono’s book title? While
arguing that Korean literature as national literature should be part of
Japanese literature, Ch’oe did not present any concrete ideas about how to
put the principle into practice in creative writing other than emphasizing
the importance of everyday life in which writers could learn the senti-
ment of the nation.
Regardless of Ch’oe’s view on what would become of Korean literature,
Korean language literature would linger until the Korean language was
completely replaced by Japanese, as called for by colonial policy. Even
though the number of literary works in Korean was steadily dwindling as
more and more writers and poets wrote in Japanese under the pressure of
the colonial authorities, the majority of writers and poets either contin-
ued to write in Korean or stopped publishing at once for various reasons.
Their silence cannot be explained only by a nationalistic allegiance to the
Korean language. First of all, there were discrepancies among Korean
writers in their levels of Japanese fluency. As the literary historian Kim
Yunsik pointed out, although most intellectuals in Korea were bilingual,
only a small number of them were actually capable of producing literary
works in Japanese.68 For those Korean writers who were handicapped by
their limited Japanese fluency, the replacement of Korean by Japanese as
the dominant literary language meant the end of their literary careers.
The Japanese colonial authorities and their propagandists like Ch’oe
recognized that the complete replacement of Korean by Japanese was a
long term project and would not be accomplished soon.69 Accordingly,
the journal Kokumin Bungaku that Ch’oe founded and managed contin-
ued to publicize as late as 1942 that it planned to regularly issue Korean-
language literary collections even after it had decided to publish the
monthly exclusively in Japanese and abandon its initial schedule of four
issues per year in Korean and the rest in Japanese. In the announcement
of the end of the Korean-language issues, Ch’oe argued that national lit-
erature in the genuine sense should be written in Japanese, but at the

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 93
same time, he insisted that the journal’s decision aimed not to put an end
to Korean-language literature but instead to encourage intellectuals to
take the initiative in the everyday use of Japanese. 70
Thus, in Ch’oe’s aspirations, “Korean literature in a time of transition”
belonged to a liminal state in which Korean-language literature was
gradually being replaced by a literature that was firmly integrated into
Japanese literature through the exclusive use of Japanese as the medium
of literary expression. It was only through translation that the di}erence
between Korean literature in the present, which was primarily written in
Korean, and the national literature that was to come in the future, which
would be written exclusively in Japanese, could be instantly transcended.
As a consequence, one form of transitional Korean literature advocated
by Ch’oe was literature in translation from Korean into Japanese. As a
matter of fact, as early as 1936, he had begun translating Korean stories
into Japanese.71
Two chapters of Korean Literature in a Time of Transition were Ch’oe’s
own Japanese translations of two earlier essays he had originally written
in Korean. In a sense, the translations can be seen as another example of
his attempts to put his idea of national literature into practice. Ironically,
however, minuscule di}erences between the original articles and the
translations foreshadow the inevitable failure of his attempts. When
reading the original articles and the translated chapters side by side, the
reader can detect a subtle di}erence in the assumed readership between
the originals and the translations. In lieu of conclusion, I show the ways
in which such one di}erence destabilized Ch’oe’s framing of Korean
culture and literature under the category of the Japanese national cul-
ture and literature and interrupted his ultimate endeavor to establish an
autonomous space for Korean culture within the Japanese empire.
tr ansl ating difference
Ch’oe wrote most of the essays included in Korean Literature in a Time of
Transition in Japanese, but the first two chapters were his own transla-
tions into Japanese of articles he had first published two years earlier,
in 1941, in his Korean-language literary journal Inmun Pyŏngnon. The
first chapter, “Tenkanki no Bunka Riron” (Cultural Theory in a Time of
Transition), was a Japanese translation of an essay that Ch’oe previously
had published in Korean under a slightly di}erent title, “Chŏnhyŏnggi
ŭi Munhwa Iron” (Cultural Theory in a Time of Change).72 In the essay,
Ch’oe criticizes both the popular understanding of culture as the pursuit

94 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
of the Western lifestyle and intellectuals’ privileging of culture as an
absolutely autonomous realm insulated from secular life and politics—
the two tendencies he perceived to be dominant in Japan and Korea dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s. Ch’oe goes on to call for a new culture firmly
rooted in the nation state to replace modern culture, which, in his view,
would be based on rationalism, individualism, and cosmopolitanism.
The second chapter, “Bungaku Seishin no Tenkan” (Shift in Literary
Spirit), was a critical essay in which Ch’oe traced the cause of the ongoing
cultural crisis to the world historical transition that resulted from con-
flicts among nations and states in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ch’oe
argued that such a seismic change in history invalidated modern litera-
ture and its ideological underpinning— individualism— and called for a
new literary spirit connected to the nation state. Its Japanese title was
the literal translation of “Munhak Chŏngsin ŭi Chŏnhwan,” the title of the
original Korean language essay.73
Ch’oe’s criticism of modernity and cosmopolitanism in both essays
was in tune with the dominant Japanese discourse of the late 1930s and
early 1940s, which denounced the cosmopolitan tendencies in Japanese
society of earlier decades.74 The ascendancy of cosmopolitanism and its
association with commercialism in interwar Japanese popular culture
provoked anxiety among intellectuals over the Japanese national iden-
tity.75 Because cosmopolitanism was based on a belief in universal cul-
ture, a growing number of intellectuals felt anxious about the potential
threat that such universalism posed to the national subjectivity. Many
Japanese intellectuals began to critically reflect on the universalist impli-
cations of cosmopolitanism for the Japanese national identity in reaction
to the ascendancy of cosmopolitanism during the 1920s.
Whereas Japanese cosmopolitanism between the wars aligned Japa-
nese civilization with that of the West on the basis of universalism, the
growing anxiety over such cosmopolitanism led many intellectuals to
perceive Japan as becoming culturally colonized by the West. On the
other hand, both Japanese cosmopolitanism and anxiety over it did not
take serious account of Japan’s relationship with its colonies in their
schemas of Japanese cultural identity with respect to the West. It would
not be an unjustified exaggeration to say that Japanese intellectual dis-
course on cultural identity remained oblivious of Japan’s colonies until
the early 1940s, when the Japanese government needed support for war
e}orts from its colonies and pressed intellectuals to embrace the idea of
the unity between Japan and its colonies.
In the early 1930s, the Japanese state stepped up persecution of the

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 95
Proletarian Literature Movement that had dominated Japanese literary
circles since the 1920s. Under pressure from the state, a majority of leftist
intellectuals recanted their political beliefs.
As briefly discussed in Chapter 2, following the ideological conversion
(tenkō) of leftist intellectuals, those associated with the Japan Romantic
School expressed their concern about the rapid ascendancy of mass cul-
ture accompanying the economic boom after World War I and its degen-
erative e}ect on society. The commodification of culture was regarded
as a result of a modernization, which was equated in Japan with west-
ernization. Therefore, anti– Western sentiments in Japan were embedded
in criticism of the commodification of culture. More and more Japanese
intellectuals ranging from the communist Takakura Teru to the cultural
conservative Yasuda Yojūrō deemed Western modernity to be a threat
to the indigenous tradition of Japan. They saw Japanese culture being
colonized by modern culture, which they conflated with Western cul-
ture and commodification. The Japanese intellectuals came to regard the
creation of literary works that confirmed the Japanese national identity
as the only cure for the malaise of modern culture. This was what they
called kokumin bungaku.
Since the Meiji Restoration, Japanese intellectuals had been educated
in the tradition of the European humanities. However, many Japanese
intellectuals began to think that modern Japanese culture was a mere
copy of Western culture and came to believe that the copy could never
match up to the original, let alone exceed it. Many Japanese intellectu-
als felt their culture was an inferior translation of the original text, and
lamented that they had let their own tradition be subsumed in a copy of
Western culture. Such critics as Asano Akira and Yasuda thus denounced
modern Japanese literature since the Meiji Restoration as the product
of parasitic intellectuals detached from the Japanese nation (kokumin).
These intellectuals called on writers to create a new literature grounded
in a conceptualization of a Japanese nation. As Japan’s aggression in the
Asian continent escalated into the war against America and Britain,
Asano and Yasuda came to see the conflict as an opportunity to recover
“the spirit of the opening of the nation.”76 However, the national litera-
ture debate cannot be dismissed as merely the expression of an absurdly
fanatic nationalism. As discussed above, the anxieties of intellectuals
of di}erent stripes intersected at the point of trying to figure out how
to cope with the loss of tradition and how to overcome the threat of
modernity posed by the alien civilization of the West. The remedy they
proposed was to anchor literature in a fixed foundation that could not be

96 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
undermined by the incessant churning of modernity. Despite disparities
in their arguments, those participating in the national literature debate
agreed that Japanese literature should be based on kokumin (the people of
the nation or the nation).
The concept of a national literature depended on the ability to define
the nation. Kokumin is usually translated into English as “nation,” while
a similar term, jinmin, is translated as the “people” in general. However,
the two words were used interchangeably to refer to the people of Japan
during the Meiji period. As seen in the Chinese compound, kokumin, the
word defines people in relation to the country or state (kuni) in contrast
to jinmin, which lacks such a connection. As a consequence, more weight
is placed on people than on the state in jinmin. That might be why social-
ists and leftists frequently used the word jinmin to describe the people in
opposition to the established order and the government in such cases as
jinmin sensen (popular front), jinminshugi (populism), and so on. In that
sense, jinmin is the opposite of kokka (state) or seifu (government).
Another word often used in prewar Japan was shinmin. Although its
literal meaning is closer to the English term “imperial subject,” shinmin
also referred to the people of Japan, because they all, under the Meiji
constitution of 1889, were the subjects of the emperor. The term often
ap peared in imperial edicts. As the intellectual historian Yun Kŏnch’a
has pointed out, even though such Meiji intellectuals as Tokutomi Sōhō
popularized the term kokumin as opposed to shinmin, the Meiji state cur-
tailed the liberal aspects of kokumin and interpellated the Japanese as the
subjects of the state.77
According to the social linguist Kyōgoku Okikazu, jinmin was predom-
inantly used in the early Meiji and was especially popular among those
who were participants in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. In
contrast, kokumin gained currency beginning in the mid– Meiji period
as the government tried to foster strong loyalty to the state, and more
and more Japanese intellectuals gravitated toward nationalism.78 It was at
this same time that the Meiji intellectual Takayama Chogyū (1871– 1902)
called for the establishment of a national literature (kokumin bungaku) to
revitalize the Japanese spirit. The nationalism of the mid– Meiji period
turned on the predominant use of the concept kokumin.
There is another problematic word that must be clarified with respect
to its relationship with the term kokumin. The English word nation can
be translated into Japanese as either minzoku or kokumin. Whereas koku-
min emphasizes the people’s relationship with the state, minzoku gives
more weight to the ethnic aspect of nation. The two terms, however, were

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 97
used interchangeably throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, such
Japanese scholars as the sociologist Usui Jishō endeavored to establish a
more rigorous distinction between minzoku and kokumin. In April 1937,
the prominent intellectual journal Shisō published a special issue on the
concept of nation. In the issue, Usui characterized minzoku as a commu-
nity based on culture while defining kokumin as the subjects of the state.
In the same issue, the economist Yanaihara Tadao saw minzoku rooted in
culture. And the historian Imai Tōshiki pointed to minzoku as the folk
based on culture and kokumin as the nation subjected to the state.79
All of these e}orts to distinguish minzoku from kokumin reflected the
political reality of an empire within which not only the Japanese but also
other peoples (minzoku) were subjects of the state. On the other hand, in
his book Minzokuron (The Theory of Minzoku), Takata Yasuma (1883–
1972) stated that kokumin was a modern form of minzoku. He argued that
whereas minzoku was a passively formed community based on tradition,
kokumin was an actively formed community based on the conscious goals
and ideals held by its members. At any rate, there was a loosely shared
assumption among Japanese intellectuals that minzoku was a cultural
community based on tradition whereas kokumin was a political commu-
nity associated with the state.80
Such categorization of nation as a political community raises ques-
tions about the Japanese national literature debate of the 1930s and 1940s.
As briefly mentioned above, the discourse on national literature lacked
any substantial deliberation on the colonized, who were not ethnically
Japanese but nonetheless were politically subject to the Japanese empire.
On the surface, the West was deployed in the debate as the other against
which the Japanese nation is defined. The Japanese intellectuals who
engaged in the national literature debate thought that modernity pushed
Japan into discarding tradition and culturally colonized Japan. Because
modernity was also associated with the West, the intellectuals’ discourse
on national literature was built on the dichotomy between the West and
Japan.
Ch’oe’s essays eerily repeated such Japanese criticism of modernity and
cosmopolitanism, silencing significant di}erences between Japan and its
colony Korea in their relationships with the West and with modernity
and cosmopolitanism, which were after all introduced to Korea primarily
through Japan during the colonial period. In that sense, Korea’s relation-
ship with the West from which both modernity and cosmopolitanism
originated was even more complicated than Japan’s. In the minds of most
Korean intellectuals, modernity was associated not only with the West

98 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
but also with Japan. To such Korean intellectuals as the modernist poet
Yi Sang, Japan was another source of cosmopolitan modernism, not a
mere copy of a Western cosmopolitan metropolis.81 As a consequence,
when Korean intellectuals denounced modernity and cosmopolitanism
and advocated a return to tradition, the target of such criticism could be
extended beyond the West to Japan as briefly discussed in the previous
chapter.
The way in which the term national literature (kokumin bungaku)
gained currency for the first time in Korea clearly suggests the di}er-
ence between Japan and Korea. As discussed in the previous chapter, in
reaction to the rise of proletarian literature in the 1920s, a group of non-
socialist, nationalist intellectuals emphasized the importance of Korean
cultural tradition in literary creation and called for a national literature.
They believed that the rise of proletarian literature and its emphasis on
class conflict undermined the unity of Korean society. The intellectuals
also felt that a national literature would help raise Korean consciousness
to withstand pressures to imitate Japan’s mimicry of Western culture.
Preserving Korean cultural tradition was at the center of their argument.
Needless to say, in this case, nation referred to the Korean ethnic nation.
However, Ch’oe kept silent on such di}erences. He mentioned curso-
rily that the entirety of Japanese culture was in crisis, and so was Korean
culture. He did not even attempt to deliberate similarities between
Japan and Korea as non– Western societies whose traditions were being
encroached on by menacing Western cultural influence disguised as uni-
versal culture as if he felt that such an emphasis on similarities between
Japan and Korea would be redundant. Ch’oe seems to have believed the
fact that Korea was politically part of the Japanese empire obviated any
justification for his conflation between the colonizer and the colonized.
When Ch’oe called for a return to tradition in opposition to cosmo-
politanism by following the dominant view of Japanese discourse on
national identity, however, his emphasis on the importance of tradition
suddenly destabilized his conflation between Japan and Korea. Although
the interruption was momentary and compromised in the original text,
its destabilizing e}ect on Ch’oe’s overall conflation of Japan and Korea
was much more pronounced in the Japanese translation of the essay. In
the original Korean-language essay, Ch’oe wrote,
If turning our eyes back onto ourselves, [we will realize that] we,
having left the house of our tradition, have wandered on the grounds
of the houses of others not like us. We mistook the extremely super-
ficial imitation of the Western lifestyle for culture life (munhwa

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 99
saenghwal in Korean; bunka seikatsu in Japanese). Even those who
inwardly despised such vulgarization of culture saw the home of their
heart in “the ether of cosmopolitanism” and wandered around without
connecting to solid ground.82
Echoing Japanese intellectuals’ poignant nostalgia for lost tradition as
exemplarily expressed by the poet Hagiwara Sakutarō in his 1938 es –
say “Return to Japan” (Nihon e no Kaiki), Ch’oe called on his readers to
embrace tradition by establishing a new culture rooted in the nation
state.83 However, he did not specify what or even which tradition his
readers should return to, although his readers could conjecture that the
tradition Ch’oe was talking about was Korean tradition, because it is
fairly clear that he assumed all of his readers to be Korean.
Ch’oe often used the first person plural pronoun we (uri) throughout
the essays. A we is ostensibly used to invoke an emotive as well as an
intellectual community imaginarily formed between the author and his
readers. Although any author can and must have a target readership in
mind before and while writing, this we need not be imagined as a homo-
geneous community ethnically, racially, or even linguistically because
texts can be translated into other languages. As mentioned earlier, it
is quite clear that Ch’oe considered his readers of his original Korean-
language essay to be Korean. For example, when criticizing the popu-
lar understanding of culture as the superficial imitation of the Western
lifestyle, Ch’oe took munhwa chut’aek (bunka jūtaku, culture housing),
the Japanese and Western mixed-style housing, as an example of such a
misconception of culture:
What mode of life has so-called culture life indicated since the
Taishō period? What springs to our mind first is culture housing.
Since it is basically Japanese-West mixed-style housing, the Korean
style must be added to it when we build it. There must be a gas oven
in the kitchen and a radio and a gramophone in the living room.
Every member of the family, dressed principally in Western-style
clothes, drinks coffee and black tea. The husband and wife go to the
movies once a week and generally hold a liberal attitude toward their
children’s education, decisively turning against old customs and
tradition, but they lack any discipline or principle in their life. Their
only personality trait is cheap hedonism. Thus, the culture life is an
extremely superficial imitation of the Western-style way of life at
the service of cheap pleasure taken to an extreme. At the same time,
the real facts of the culture life are the ignorance of, and pretended
disinterest toward, real daily life and the more important aspects of
tradition.84

100 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
As seen in his cynical caricature of the culture life presented above, Ch’oe
addressed Koreans as “we,” seeming to take it for granted that a com-
munity formed between him and his readers through the interpellation
of “we,” the first-person plural pronoun, was exclusive to Koreans as the
Korean-style added to culture housing was inseparably connected to the
we in the phrase in question.
Ch’oe faithfully rendered this part of the essay in his Japanese transla-
tion, with one significant exception. “Since it is basically Japanese-West
mixed-style housing, the Korean style must be added to it when we build
it” (uri ŭi sonŭro chiŭlt’aeen) in the original was altered in the transla-
tion to read “since it is basically Japanese-West mixed style housing, the
Korean style is naturally added to it on the peninsula (hantō no baai).”85
The we in the original text is erased in the translated passage, and instead
it is replaced with the peninsula. Human subjectivity inscribed in the
we is suppressed in the replacement, the peninsula, which is the name
of a geographical object as seen from the Japanese archipelago. In that
sense, through translation, Koreans are doubly objectified; first, they are
deprived of the first person plural we; and second, they are metonymi-
cally replaced with an object, the peninsula, which also figures in the
pejorative “hantōjin” or “peninsulars,” the meaning of which can be made
out only in opposition to “naichijin,” the people of the Japan proper, in
other words, the real Japanese people. In short, at this specific moment in
the Japanese translation, Ch’oe did not take it for granted that his readers
were Korean as he had in the original Korean-language text.
The community established between the author and his readers
through the interpellation of we in the Japanese translation includes
anyone able to read the Japanese text. The assumed readership includes
the Japanese, who are signified in opposition to the peninsula, which
in turn stands in metonymically for the Korean people. When readers
juxtaposed this replacement and displacement of Koreans with Ch’oe’s
call for a return to tradition, they surely felt that the meaning of “our
tradition” to which Ch’oe urged his readers to return is undecidable in
Derrida’s sense. To which tradition was he urging his readers to return?
Because his readers were not limited to Koreans, it was unclear whether
the tradition was Korean or Japanese, or even that of East Asia as a whole,
which would subsume both.
Indeed, there is the possibility that the tradition might refer to some-
thing other than Korean tradition per se because the essays advocate the
establishment of a new culture on the basis of the nation state with Japan
being the state to which Koreans belong. In some of his essays origi-

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 101
nally written in Japanese, Ch’oe argued that Korean intellectuals should
immerse themselves in Japanese cultural tradition by studying such his-
torical and literary classics as the Kojiki and Manyōshū, as well as such
works of the 18th-century “nativist learning” scholar Motoori Norinaga,
including his Kojikiden (Commentary on the Records of Ancient Matters),
Naobi no Mitama (The Rectifying Spirit), and Tamagatsuma (Wicker
Basket). On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, Ch’oe urged Korean
writers to continue writing about Korea, old and new, and to maintain the
Korean cultural particularity. His treatises on Japanese national litera-
ture bristle with contrasting polarities, which actually work to maintain
the consistency of his arguments that are at pains to carve out a space
for Korean culture within the Japanese empire. The di�culty in deter-
mining the meaning of tradition certainly comes not least from Ch’oe’s
use of polarities. But there is a more fundamental issue implicated in the
indeterminacy of the meaning of tradition.86
Strictly speaking, there would be no logical inconsistency even if
Ch’oe had Japanese tradition in mind when he was calling on his Korean
readers to return to tradition, because, in his framing, Korean tradition
could be considered a subset of Japanese tradition inasmuch as Korean
culture was deemed to be part of Japanese culture. As seen in his title
Korean Literature in a Time of Transition, however, there remained
ambivalence in Ch’oe’s thinking on the relationship between Japan and
Korea. Japan retained residues of the primordial community of Japanese
folk rather than the community of the higher order, the Japanese state. It
is not always clear whether the sign Japan signified the primordial ethnic
community or the political community mediated by the state. In other
words, Japan is an oscillating signifier whose meaning is undecidable.
This undecidability interrupted Ch’oe’s discursive project of subsuming
the Korean people into Japan, the meaning of which was intended to be
fixed onto “the Japanese state.” In his attempt to ward o} the undecid-
ability, Ch’oe deployed nation (kokumin) as a sphere inclusive of both
Koreans and Japanese to unravel the tenacious conflation of ethnic Japan
and the Japanese state. The slippage between Japan as the ethnic group
and another Japan as the political collectivity parallels the incongruence
of the first-person plural we between the original Korean text and Ch’oe’s
own Japanese translation.
Korean (Chōsen) in the book title is itself haunted by undecidability.
It is undecidable whether the adjective is related to Korea as a primordial
community irrespective of the Japanese state or as an ethnic group bound
by blood but firmly subsumed into the Japanese nation. The signification

102 / The Location of “Korean” Culture
of Korea exceeds the meaning that Ch’oe deemed desirable. As mentioned
above, in urging writers to moderate the use of Korean local color in their
creative writing, Ch’oe warned that writers’ emphasis on Koreanness
might mislead readers into interpreting their works as signaling a politi-
cal message of support for Korean independence. The warning marked
his anxiety over the undecidability of Korean, which destabilized his
framing of Korea as part of the Japanese empire politically as well as
culturally and thus enabled his own advocacy of the particularity of
Korean culture to register as a subversive message. In that sense, the
book Korean Literature in a Time of Transition was ultimately an attempt
to exorcise the undecidability of Korea by redefining Korean literature as
an integral part of Japanese literature. Needless to say, the attempt was
anything but successful as seen in the undecidability of the meaning of
tradition.
The Korean in the book’s title resonates with the undecidability of
Japan, the meaning of which oscillates between Japan as the community
of higher order inclusive of Koreans and other colonized peoples within
the Japanese empire and as the primordial ethnic community exclusive to
the Japanese people. Korean in the title simultaneously masks and traces
the lack of transparent significance of Japanese as distinct from Korean.
In that sense, Korean literature in Ch’oe’s title is a Derridean supplement
to Japanese literature.87 As a Derridean supplement, it is distinct from
but simultaneously subordinate to Japanese literature, the literature of
the ethnic Japanese, which does not need to be particularized as seen
in Aono’s book title. On the other hand, Korean literature registers as
something necessary to make Japanese literature complete so that the
latter can become the literature of the Japanese empire, which ultimately
must be inclusive of Korean literature and Taiwanese literature along
with the Japanese literature of the Japanese folk. Thus, Korean literature
simultaneously portends the presence of Japanese literature, as in the
literature of the Japanese folk, and traces the lack of it, as in the litera-
ture of the Japanese empire. In other words, Japanese literature emerges
at the moment when Korean literature is placed in juxtaposition to it.
This dynamic inevitably establishes a hierarchical relationship between
Korean literature and Japanese literature. Japanese literature is thus
assumed to be the standard against which the value of Korean literature
is judged. Moreover, the hierarchy in discourse mirrors the hierarchical
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in colonial society.
Ch’oe’s attempt to frame the particularity of Korean culture as the
fence to protect its autonomous space was parasitically dependent on

The Location of “Korean” Culture / 103
the hierarchical structure of colonial society. The parasitic dependence
was clearly revealed at the moment Ch’oe argued that Korean literature
advanced the theory of national literature further than its Japanese
counterpart because Japanese loyalty to the Japanese state was a given.88
Japanese ethnicity automatically ensured the allegiance of those identi-
fied as the Japanese folk (minzoku) to the Japanese state. Needless to say,
not only was the end goal for Koreans to become part of the Japanese
nation (kokumin) temporally placed in the future when Koreans’ alle-
giance to the Japanese state would no longer be questioned, but the model
of the Japanese nation for Koreans was also spatially assigned to the
Japanese folk (minzoku) whose loyalty did not need to be interrogated as
rigorously as that of Koreans. Ch’oe’s deployment of nation was thus des-
tined to preserve the colonial order that prioritized the Japanese folk over
Koreans, despite his intention to neutralize the centrality of Japanese folk
by using the term nation, exactly because he never intended to challenge
the legitimacy of colonial domination. Instead, he intended to beg for as
much autonomy for Korean culture as the Japanese colonial authorities
would allow.
Unlike the many other Korean intellectuals who hal�eartedly col-
laborated with the Japanese colonial government when being forced to
commit themselves to the Japanese colonial policy of assimilation, Ch’oe
tackled the contradictions brought about by the assimilation policy in the
late stage of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Ch’oe’s writings centered
on two contradictions: that between the autonomy of culture from poli-
tics and the supremacy of politics over culture and that between Korea as
a cultural community distinct from Japan and Korea as a political com-
munity subject to the Japanese state. However, Ch’oe never attempted to
overcome the contradictions politically even though they were rooted in
the politics of colonization and the ensuing assimilation policy. Instead,
he struggled to deal with them aesthetically by calling for the estab-
lishment of national literature. Needless to say, the irony was that his
endeavors in the realm of aesthetics to establish a new national culture
and literature not only ensued from the political demands of the assimi-
lation policy but also colluded with the politics of colonial domination.

104
4. Translation and Its
Postcolonial Discontents
The Postwar Controversy over
Tōma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s
Japanese Translations of Korean Poetry
It was a chilling moment in Japanese literary circles in 1956 when the
translator Kim Soun attacked an ostensibly sympathetic reading of his
own new collection of Korean poetry in Japanese translation, an expan-
sion of a series of colonial-era anthologies dating back to 1940. Kim,
the preface to whose earlier collection of Korean folksongs in Japanese
translation was by Kitahara Hakushū and was discussed in the intro-
duction, opened his scathing denunciation of commentaries published in
1954 by the renowned Japanese historian Tōma Seita (1913– ): “I feel it
even more di�cult to o}er corrections and explanations to wild specula-
tion and dogma held by a historian especially because they do not derive
from his ill will but come shrouded in good will for the Korean nation.”1
The language of Kim’s response was harsh and judgmental throughout,
and even sarcastic at times. Such a hostile response from Kim must have
been disconcerting to Tōma, given that his essays held the Korean poetry
in high regard. What was it that so incensed Kim, whose translations
of Korean folk songs, children’s songs, and modern poetry during the
colonial period earned him respect and a reputation as the authoritative
guide and consummate translator of Korean culture and literature in the
Japanese language? The chapter delves into that question, which, as dem-
onstrated below, requires an examination of a series of additional ques-
tions concerning history, representation, literature, translation, national-
ism, and modernity in the context of Japanese colonialism in Korea.
A prominent Marxist historian specializing in ancient Japanese
history, Tōma is best known for his endeavor to raise a national con-
sciousness conducive to a democratic society by proposing during the
postwar period a new national history centered on the Japanese people
(the minzoku, or ethnic nation) rather than the state or ruling elite. He

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 105
hoped that such a national history would not only refute the right-wing
chauvinist history dominant in prewar and wartime Japan but also lead
the Japanese masses to rally against what postwar Japanese leftists saw
as American imperialist hegemony in East Asia.
In 1954, Tōma ventured outside of his vocational realm and wrote a
series of essays titled “Notes on Korean Poetry.” In his view, the Korean
poems, which were written during the colonial period and subsequently
collected in Kim’s Korean Poetry Anthology, could be read as allegories of
the Korean people’s plight under Japanese rule. Tōma especially valued
the collective national identity expressed by the modern Korean poems
and reasoned that modern Korean poetry represented the sentiments
of the Korean people because it carried on literary traditions from pre-
modern folksongs that had also shown the Korean people’s resilience to
oppression by the ruling classes.
Tōma deemed “hometown” (furusato) to be a recurring theme run-
ning through a number of Korean poems in the anthology and held this
emphasis up as proof that Korean intellectuals and poets had not lost
contact with their people. Moreover, in Tōma’s eyes, in the Koreans’ nos-
talgia for the hometown and laments for the irrevocable changes brought
to their native land during the colonial period, the poems told allegori-
cally of the people’s su}ering under Japanese colonial rule. Tōma found
modern Japanese poetry, in contrast with Korean poetry, lacking such a
thematic emphasis on hometown, a sign of the breakdown of the sym-
bolic linkages between intellectuals and the masses.
While upholding modern Korean poetry over its Japanese counter-
part for thematic emphasis on the hometown, however, Tōma hardly
touched on the Korean poems’ literary value. When he did, he mentioned
rather dismissively that they were rustic and unsophisticated (soboku)
compared to stylistically better crafted modern Japanese poetry. In re –
sponse, Kim blamed Tōma for simplistically reducing literature to his-
tory. In Kim’s view, Tōma’s reading violently reduced the lyrical poems
into easily understood reflections of Koreans’ colonial experience. Indeed,
in his essays, Tōma did not give due thought to the stylistic quality of
the Korean poems because he was reading them for their references to
history, crudely assuming that words and phrases from the poems cor-
respond transparently to historical facts and events outside of the textual
realm.
On the other hand, it can also be argued that because the Korean
poems listed in the 1953 Korean Poetry Anthology were written during
the colonial period, the conflicts and contradictions of colonial society

106 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
could not help but have a}ected the ways in which these literary works
were written, no matter how tenuous that influence might have been.
One can further argue that colonial experience should be the ultimate
hermeneutical horizon on which literary interpretation of colonial lit-
erature is located. Because the oppressive mechanisms of colonial rule
permeated every nook of colonized society, including its cultural realm,
the history of colonial experience lies latent under the surface of every
text. Thus, even if a text does not stand in transparent referential rela-
tion to colonial history, its narrative nevertheless tells the reader about
colonial reality refracted in it. Kim sweepingly denied the possibility of
reading colonial history into the poems, however, calling attention to the
persistent problem of the relationship between history and literature.
Tōma’s reading was especially egregious in Kim’s eyes because what
he saw as Tōma’s misinterpretations relied exclusively on Kim’s own
translations into Japanese. Tōma knew no Korean. The problem of trans-
lation loomed even larger than Kim insisted and Tōma realized. Kim
often took the liberty of rendering poems so far beyond usual limits set
on translators that many of his translations would easily make Japanese–
Korean bilingual readers raise their eyebrows if they were to compare the
originals with his translations.2 Drawing on conventional Japanese poetic
diction, Kim often replaced original expressions with his own, expunged
words without providing alternatives, and even added entirely new words
to his translations. Kim defended his method, saying that to communi-
cate the spirit of the original poems to Japanese readers he had to sacrifice
literalness and alter the sense of the originals because irreducible di}er-
ence in language and culture between Japan and Korea prevented literal
translation from conveying the poetic sentiments of the originals.
Kim’s tendency for liberal translation is pertinent to a discussion of
Tōma’s controversial interpretations especially because the historian’s
first essay on the 1953 Korean Poetry Anthology pivoted on Kim’s own
expressions, which he inserted in his Japanese translations, critical
alterations of the original poems that Tōma did not have the linguistic
abilities to detect. Despite his righteous condemnations of what he saw as
Tōma’s misreadings of the poems, Kim himself did not say a word about
his own intentional mistranslations even though it was his alterations
that provided Tōma with motifs for reading the Korean poems as the
national allegory of Koreans’ plight under Japanese rule. Tōma’s absolute
dependence on translation in appreciating the poems and Kim’s troubling
silence on his amendments raises the question about what makes trans-

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 107
lation felicitous in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This question of
translation is another focus of discussion in this chapter.
The chapter examines the theoretical implications of the issues raised
by the debate between Tōma and Kim through Fredric Jameson’s 1986
essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”3
Even at a cursory glance, Tōma’s reading of modern Korean poetry echoes
Jameson’s contentious essay in which Jameson suggested that the litera-
ture of non– Western, former colonies should be read as national allegory.
As shown by Aijaz Ahmad’s trenchant criticism, Jameson’s essay has
been criticized for its problematic demarcation of the so-called Third
World, its indiscriminate grouping of vastly diverse bodies of literature
under the single rubric of “Third-World literature,” and its reductive read-
ing of “Third-World” literature as the allegory of non– Western peoples’
collective experience with colonialism.4
Jameson himself was well aware that his approach risked positing dif-
ferences of the other. Invoking Edward Said’s Orientalism, he conceded
that his argument could not help “othering” non– Western literature. In
other words, Jameson knew well that his advocacy for Third-World litera-
ture as national allegory could not help but commit the epistemological
violence of appropriating the radical di}erence of the other even though
it was intended to a�rm rather than deny the value of non– Western
literature. Jameson suggested there are only two options available to
Western intellectuals when encountering Third-World literature: They
can either approvingly recognize its di}erence or unreflectively evaluate
it against Western cultural standards. He was willing to take the risk
of appropriating the radical di}erence of Third-World literature through
recognition of its value rather than repeating the mistake of evaluating it
against conventional standards based in Western liberal and humanistic
universalism.
The fundamental issue of representation lies at the core of the prob-
lem that pervades Jameson’s discussion on Third-World literature, and
it is not easily resolved. Nevertheless, the di�culty in tackling the issue
should not lead to settling for either the domestication of the other’s
radical di}erence or a return to liberal and humanistic universalism.
Envisioning an alternative is another thread of this chapter’s argument.
To look beyond the two modalities to which Jameson confined himself
in encountering the other, I interject Emmanuel Levinas, who criticized
Western philosophy for violating the radical di}erence of the other and
assimilating it into the same.

108 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
It cannot be stressed enough that my intention in this chapter is not
to dismiss the sincerity of progressive Japanese intellectuals in their
attempt to align the Japanese with other Asian peoples. I rather call
attention to a blind spot in their attempt to emulate the nationalism
of the formerly colonized and to reconfigure Japanese nationalism for
progressive causes. More specifically, I critique the Japanese leftist intel-
lectuals’ lack of attention to the di}erence between Japan and Korea in
their alignment with Korean nationalism. In other words, I intend not to
demean the Japanese leftist intellectuals’ sincere endeavors to establish
solidarity with Koreans but to examine their failure to uphold the other-
ness of Koreans in their endeavors. Furthermore, I emphasize that failure
to recognize the alterity of the other is not limited to the particular his-
torical moment of postwar Japanese leftist nationalism. I bring in Fredric
Jameson’s thesis on Third-World literature to discussion exactly because
I want to highlight the persistent di�culty of upholding the alterity of
the other when progressive intellectuals positively evaluate the cultures
of formerly colonized nations. As briefly mentioned earlier and further
discussed later, the problem lies at the center of the issue of representa-
tion itself. By invoking Levinasian ethics, which urges reflection on the
violence inherent in representation and restraint from violating the alter-
ity of the other, I argue that only the radical insistence on ethicality in
one’s relationship with the other can serve as a guide out of the pitfalls
that beleaguer progressive intellectuals when they attempt to ally them-
selves with the formerly colonized.
To be sure, as noted in my preface, Levinas was unwilling to iden-
tify actual colonized peoples, especially the victims of the Israeli state’s
violence, as the other. Furthermore, his indi}erence to cultures outside
the West makes one hesitant to invoke him to critique colonial and post-
colonial texts and contexts.5 Nevertheless, his relentless concern for the
alterity of the other merits attention partly because it is inspiration to
see the ethical issues lying at the center of the epistemological problem
of representation. In other words, his concern demands his readers real-
ize that ethics is the first philosophy, preceding epistemology, ontology,
and politics. The Levinas I invoke in the chapter is more Levinasian than
Levinas himself, because he hesitated to condemn the violence of the
Israeli state and refused to identify Palestinian refugees as an other. It
is instead a proper name, which exceeds the person to whom the name
is attached. It is Levinasian thinking rather than Levinas himself, the
thinking that requires opening up to unceasing ethical concern for the
other. The theoretical discussion in this chapter is a Levinasian gesture.6

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 109
the prehistory of the 1953
korean poetry anthology
An examination of the prehistory of Kim’s Korean Poetry Anthology is
necessary to understand the colonial and postcolonial contexts of its pub-
lication. The translator Kim Soun first published an anthology of modern
Korean poetry in 1940 under the title Chichi Iro no Kumo (Milky Clouds).
It contained translations of 101 poems by 43 poets, almost all of whom
were to become canonical figures in modern Korean literary history. Kim
seems to have selected the poems by consulting other anthologies avail-
able in Korea in the late 1930s.7
Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the impor-
tance of Japan’s largest colony, Korea, had come into clearer view because
of its proximity to China and its large population. Accordingly, Japanese
interest in the colony and its culture surged as the war in the Asian con-
tinent intensified. The publication of Kim’s Milky Clouds marked this ris-
ing interest in Korean culture. The anthology was very well received by
the Japanese literary establishment. The fact that Shimazaki Tōson, one
of the most established Japanese writers, wrote the preface demonstrated
how much attention its publication attracted in Japanese literary circles.
Although graciously commending the anthology, Tōson’s preface was,
however, no more than a gentle encouragement from a literary luminary.
A substantial response to the publication of the anthology was given
by the poet, writer, and critic Satō Haruo, who, in a welcoming remark
included in the anthology, praised the “poetic spirit of Asia” he found in
the Korean poems. In his view, the Asian poetic spirit the Korean poems
gave o} was unadulterated by Western literary influence because Korea
had escaped Western colonization. Certainly, such a remark can be inter-
preted as a defense of Japan’s preemptive colonization of the country,
indicating how Satō’s essay clearly showed the political circumstances of
the specific historical juncture when Japanese ideology emphasized the
solidarity of the Asian race not only to secure the loyalty of its Asian
colonies but also to justify its expansion into China and to criticize the
increasing pressure from the United States and Britain.
Although this aspect of Satō’s essay may lead to it being characterized
as a cowardly concession to the Japanese government propaganda, the
essay itself was not a mere vindication of the political motivations behind
rising interest in Korean culture in the early 1940s. To be fair to Satō,
his essay contained criticism of Japanese colonial language policy even
though the criticism was mu£ed in the ambiguity of convoluted rheto-

110 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
ric. Satō asked himself, for example, “whether or not we can be deeply
touched by the special case similar to a situation in which poets sing the
last songs in their own language which is about to perish.”8
Satō’s introductory essay suggestively revealed the limits of a liberal
and conscientious intellectual of the colonizing country, a writer who was
critical of colonial oppression but unconscious of the collusion between
colonial domination and his own patronizing sympathy toward the colo-
nized. One glaring example was his remark that oppressive rule from the
late Koryŏ period throughout the Chosŏn period had turned the Korean
people into a nation of scheming incompetents, although— he conceded—
they were not so by nature. He followed with praise for Korean poetry,
which he found blessed by excellent poets singing about daily life and
ordinary people. Satō neatly concluded that the people excelled in the
realm of poetry despite failing in politics. In other words, to stress his
praise for the excellence of Korean poetry, Satō contrasted it with Korea’s
loss of self-government, reiterating dominant colonial discourse on the
misery of the Korean people under oppressive rule before colonization
and reproducing a biased image of scheming, incompetent Koreans.
Although, as he brought his essay to an end, Satō reminded the reader
that, historically, the influence of civilization from the Asian continent
always spread to Japan not only geographically through the Korean pen-
insula but culturally through the mediation of Korean interpreters, this
recognition corresponded primarily to his earlier valuation of the pure
Asian poetic spirit in Korean poetry, which served obliquely to justify
Japanese colonization of Korea.
Kim himself regarded his anthology as the introduction of Korean
poetry to the Japanese literary establishment. In the afterword written in
an epistolary form addressed to his friend R, obviously a Japanese with
little knowledge about the Korean literary scene, Kim mentioned that he
had intended to publish an anthology of modern Korean poetry for more
than 10 years because he hoped such an introduction of modern Korean
literature would help overcome the marginality of Korean poetry on the
Japanese literary scene.9 Kim did not miss the chance to lament the grim
future of the Korean language as it was rapidly disappearing from the pub-
lic sphere in the colony as the colonial government increasingly encour-
aged the exclusive use of Japanese. The anticipated doom of the Korean
language, however, did not spoil the optimistic mood of the afterword.
Kim claimed in an optimistic tone that no matter what happened, Korean
literature would survive, although he did not specify how it would survive
and what it would turn out to be like. An even more celebratory note from

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 111
the prominent Korean intellectual Yi Kwangsu also appeared in the anthol-
ogy. Yi took the publication of the anthology as a promising opportunity
for strengthening ties between the Japanese and Koreans. Yi reasoned that
because the Japanese (yamato) and Korean nations (minzoku) are destined
to unite in defense of the empire of Japan, the task of literature was to
foster such unity by touching the hearts of the two peoples.10
At the request of the Japanese publisher Kōfūkan, Kim launched
another poetry anthology project soon thereafter, culminating in the
publication in 1943 of a two-volume anthology titled Chōsen Shishū
(Korean Poetry Anthology). A planned third volume was never pub-
lished. Out of the 101 poems collected in Milky Clouds, 90 reappeared
in Kim’s 1943 Korean Poetry Anthology. The new anthology also included
97 newly translated poems. Kim gave a more concrete reason behind
his continuing publication projects of Korean poetry anthologies: In the
preface, he complained that Korean literature had been placed ambigu-
ously with respect to Japanese literature. Kim concurred with the view
that it should not be treated as foreign literature like German and French
literature, but, at the same time, he accepted that Korean literature could
not be part of (Japanese) national literature (kokubungaku) and so ended
up awkwardly lumped together with Manchurian and Chinese literature
under the rubric of “continental literature” (tairiku bungaku). Kim antici-
pated that under the circumstances of accelerating assimilation policies,
the Korean language would be completely replaced by Japanese as the
literary language of Korea, but he contended that that process would be
completed only in the future and that Korean literature was still “crossing
the bridge” from tradition based on the Korean language to a new future
premised on Japanese. He further argued that given the importance of
this juncture, the Japanese literary establishment needed to extend a
helping hand to Korean literature and lead it to becoming an integral part
of Japanese culture. He saw his new anthology as an attempt to encour-
age the Japanese literary establishment to step up such an e}ort.11
The poetry collection that Tōma consulted when writing his essay
“Notes on Korean Poetry” was a new one-volume anthology published
in 1953 under the same title as the previous edition in the Korean Poetry
Anthology. Except for eight newly translated poems, all the poems were
taken from the previous two anthologies without modification. Kim did
not provide any introductory essay this time, but a postscript written by
a Yun Chawōn positioned the anthology as a representative record of the
Korean mind under colonial rule. Yun reminded the reader that some of
the poets included in the anthology disappeared while in exile abroad or

112 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
lost their lives during the colonial period and claimed that the su}ering
of the Korean nation intensified their national sentiments and cultivated
their a}ection for their homeland. His postscript went on to argue that
the poems recorded the history of Korean mind expressing the emotions
about life under foreign rule. Thus, even though this new anthology did
not di}er much from the previous ones in terms of contents, the way in
which it was characterized by Yun’s postscript was in marked contrast
with the characterizations given to the colonial-era anthologies. As
a matter of fact, this valorization of the new anthology as the literary
manifestation of the Korean nation’s love for their homeland is a key to
understanding why Tōma paid attention to the new anthology.
Around the time that the new Korean Poetry Anthology came out
in 1953, political developments in East Asia and Japan were pushing
Japanese leftist intellectuals to imagine a potential Japanese revolution
in the framework of nationalism. In the initial phase of the occupation,
the Japanese Communist Party took a moderate stance on the U.S. pres-
ence and on the appropriate goals and tactics for revolution in Japan. The
Party viewed the completion of a bourgeois-democratic revolution as
the immediate task and regarded the occupation as a necessary stage of
the “progressive” bourgeois-democratic revolution in Japan. As a conse-
quence, the party espoused a peaceful revolution.
As Communist Party influence grew in the Japanese labor move-
ment and communist sentiments mounted in East Asia, U.S. occupation
authorities tried to “reverse course.” Public employees were prohibited
from launching strikes, and the leftist labor movement was suppressed,
beginning as early as 1948. A number of leftists were blacklisted and
purged from public positions between 1949 and 1950 and later also from
the private sector. Authorities also reinstated right-wing wartime leaders
who had been purged in the initial phase of the occupation.12
Meanwhile, the Chinese communists had driven Chang Kaishek
and his army into Taiwan and taken power in mainland China in 1949.
The Korean War also broke out in 1950 when communist North Korea
launched a full-scale attack against U.S.-backed South Korea. The war
was one of the first military conflicts exploding out of the Cold War ten-
sion between the communist bloc and the U.S.-led Western world. Mean-
while, the Japanese government began rearmament in 1950, and signed a
security treaty with the United States in 1951 over international protests
and objections from Japanese dissidents.
The Japanese Communist Party came under severe criticism from the
Cominform in Moscow for its conciliatory attitude toward the occupation

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 113
forces. As a consequence, the party changed its orientation from peaceful
democratic revolution to militantly nationalistic anti-imperialism. For
example, in his report to the central committee plenum in January 1950,
the secretary-general of the Japanese Communist Party, Tokuda Kyūichi,
called attention to the revolutionary struggles for national liberation in
China and compared Chang Kaishek’s Guomindang government to the
Yoshida administration in Japan.13 In the eyes of Japanese leftists, the
Communist takeover of China was the victory of Chinese nationalism,
and the Korean War was the anti-imperial struggle of the Korean nation.
Many intellectuals believed that as the war on the Korean peninsula
escalated, the ever-expanding presence of American military forces in
Japan had turned the country into a virtual colony of the United States.
After Japan signed the San Francisco Treaty in 1951, the archipelago
became an invaluable military base for American forces in the region.14
The Japanese government’s willing compliance with the demands of the
United States was in sharp contrast to the Chinese Communist Party’s
victory over the Guomindang government and North Korea’s tenacious
fight against the U.S.-led United Nations forces.
The leftist intellectuals looked to Asian nationalism as a model for
Japanese nationalists to emulate in standing up to American imperialism
as well as in remedying the ultranationalism of wartime Japan. Recon-
figuring Japanese nationalism, however, required rewriting the historical
relationship of Japan to Asia and to the United States. By positing a colo-
nial relationship to the United States, Japanese leftist intellectuals con-
flated the Japanese people with Asian peoples who had strived for libera-
tion from the shackles of colonialism. Moreover, by casting the Japanese
people as subalterns to the Japanese government, the leftist intellectuals
also let them escape accountability for Japan’s own colonial expansion in
the past. Thus, while attempting to di}erentiate their vision of national-
ism from prewar right-wing nationalism, the leftist intellectuals obfus-
cated the Japanese people’s own responsibility for colonial expansion.
Nationalism came to the fore in Japanese literature as well. As the
theme for its 1951 conference, the Nihon Bungaku Kyōryokukai (Japanese
Literature Cooperative Association) discussed “Minzoku Bungaku” (eth-
nic nation literature). The “ethnic nation” or “folk” (minzoku) became
the most fashionable topic in the Japanese literary establishment. Their
vision was of a national literature that would contribute to the Japanese
people’s struggles against American imperialism and the reactionary
Japanese government sycophantically obedient to the United States.
Tōma’s attention to the 1953 Korean Poetry Anthology can be best

114 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
understood when read against the background of the surge of interest in
nationalism during the postwar period. In his essays on Kim’s anthology,
Tōma attempted to encourage his readers to see what was absent from
modern Japanese poetry, by which he meant the collective identity of
intellectuals as the integral part of the nation, who, in his eyes, constitute
the base for healthy nationalism. Tōma urged Japanese poets and writers
to learn from the ways in which the Korean poems represented the senti-
ments of the masses. That was a pressing imperative for Tōma because
Japan was not a colonizing power any more and was now a virtual colony
under U.S. hegemony. The Japanese needed to build up a national con-
sciousness on the basis of the masses to resist both U.S. hegemony as
well as the reactionary Japanese government.
The next part of the chapter will examine Tōma’s 1954 essay titled
“Furusato: Chōsenshi ni Tsuite no Nōto I” (Hometown: Notes on Korean
Poetry I) and revisit the issues raised above: the relationship between
history and literature, the problem of translation, and the appropriation
of radial di}erence in representing the other.
lost in tr ansl ation: tōm a’s inter pretations
of korean poetry and k im’s ref utation
Over the course of 1954, Tōma published four essays on Korean poetry in
the literary journals Nihon Bungaku (Japanese Literature) and Bungaku
(Literature).15 The essays make up the core chapters of a book published
the following year by the Tokyo University Press under the title Minzoku
no Shi (The Poetry of a People). Here, I am focusing on the first essay
titled “Hometown: Notes on Korean Poetry, Part I,” because it raises
questions about the issues of translation and the relationship between
history and literature and took the brunt of Kim’s criticisms of Tōma’s
essays on Korean poetry.
The essay begins with Tōma’s reading of two Korean poems written
by Yi Hayun and Pak Yongch’ŏl, respectively.16 For Tōma, the two poems
stand out due to their strong nostalgia for one’s native place.
gr av e of a n unk now n soul
A grave of
An unknown soul
Covered with grasses
Along the north gate road.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 115
A wandering
Traveler stops,
To catch his breath
Beside it.
With the building
Of the national road
The grave was flattened,
No trace remaining.
How empty it makes one feel
That the moss and dirt
That covered the grave
Were swallowed up by the road.
A grave of yesterday
Is weeping with a song of the passing years
As heartless people
Trample it underfoot.
Here lies
The unclaimed grave of an unknown soul,
A traveler’s
Resting place.
無 塚
北門の
道の傍(かたへ)に草生える
無 佛の
塚一つ
さすらひの
旅ゆく人が足とめて
塚のほとりに
憩ひしが、
國道の
拓かれてより　かの塚の
押し潰(くづ)されて
跡もなく、
塚の上(へ)に
蔽(おほ)へる土や苔草の
道に食(は)まれて
はかなしや

116 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
こ ろ々なき
人に踏まれて過ぎし日の
うたに噎(むせ)ぶや
昨(きぞ)の塚
主(あらじ)なき
無 佛の塚ありて
旅ゆく人の
憩ひしが。17
In Kim’s translation “Muenzuka” (The Grave of an Unknown Soul) of
Yi’s poem “Irŏjin Mudŏm” (A Grave Lost), Tōma interpreted the grave
destroyed by the construction of a road as the symbol of the hometown
irrevocably transformed by the cultural and economical changes of
the colonial period. Tōma associated the grave extradiegetically with a
Korean folk custom of burying those who died without leaving descen-
dents to attend to their graves beside the road outside of their villages.
These unfortunate souls included those who died too young to marry
and those who died with their families as a result of epidemics. Located
outside a village, the graves also provided a place for travelers to rest.
Travelers felt especially close to those buried in such graves because they
themselves were treated as deceased by the families and villages they left
behind. Tōma understood that because Korean villages were so isolated
from the outside world, anyone who left home was regarded as in another
world and no longer among the living. Out of compassion, passing travel-
ers piled small stones on these graves to prevent wild animals from vio-
lating the dead bodies as a way of consoling and appeasing the spirits of
the dead. Tōma reasoned that such a custom disappeared when the graves
were destroyed by the progress the new road symbolizes in the poem.
Tōma acknowledged that the narrative voices in the poems are not
identical to the poets themselves, and he recognized that both Yi and Pak
came from wealthy families and even studied in Japan and thus would
have not su}ered as much as the ordinary Korean masses had under Japa-
nese colonial rule. Nevertheless, he conflated the narrative voices of the
poems with the poets themselves because, in his view, the poems reveal
the poets’ consciousness about their nation: They are not alienated from
the Korean masses and they share a communal identity with the Korean
nation, the majority of which is rural. Put di}erently, Tōma argued that
their poems prove their communal identity because they express empathy
with the Korean masses who su}ered traumatic changes brought about by
colonial rule.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 117
In a similar way, Tōma focused on the image of the village well
(muraido) in Pak’s poem “Kohyang” (Hometown) translated by Kim as
“Furusato o Kohite Nanisemu.”
w h at good is i t to long for m y hom etow n?
What good is it to long for my hometown?
When ties with my kin are cut o} and our house is lost?
I wonder if a lone evening crow is crying.
I wonder if the village well has been moved.
Leaving the dreams of my childhood
At Mother’s grave, I became a wanderer.
Ten years a floating cloud are gone away.
What good is it to long for a hometown?
Shall I try to paint on the sky
A new hope and pleasure?
Wind, blow the scattered blossoms of memory
Over my restless body!
In vain was the dream of my hometown
Trampled underfoot now,
Like the sorrow of the first love
I vowed to a girl
From whom I was kept away.
ふるさとを戀ひて何せむ
ふるさとを戀ひて何せむ
血 (ちすぢ)絶え　吾家の失せて
夕鴉(ゆふがらす)ひとり啼くらむ
村井戸も遷されたらむ。
をさな夢　母の墓邊に
とどめてぞさすらひ流る
浮雲の十年(ととせ)はるかよ
ふるさとを戀ひて何せむ。
かの空に描(ゐが)きても見む
新らしき希望(のぞみ)、歓び、
想ひ出は散らしく花の
吹けよ風　憩ひなき身に。
はかなしや　ふるさとのゆめ
いまははた踏みしだかれて
契(ちぎ)りつ 人々に堰(せ)かれし
初戀のせつなきに似る。18

118 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
The village well functions as a motif that allows Tōma to historicize
the poem. Because the Korean mountains were denuded of trees, he
explained, rain escaped quickly to rivers as soon as it hit the ground and
people had a hard time finding enough water to sustain themselves. In
the face of such di�culties, villagers cooperated in digging wells, which
then served as the center of communal interactions in rural villages.
Tōma argued that moving the village well as described in the poem thus
suggests a drastic change taking place in the village. At this point, Tōma
speculated that such a drastic change must have to do with “development”
projects carried out in rural areas by the colonial government.
Tōma’s reading hinges figuratively on a chain of metonymies and her-
meneutically on the assumed referential connection between the text and
the external world. Both “the grave of an unknown soul” and “the village
well” symbolize the hometown, which, in turn, ultimately expresses the
ethnic nation. Needless to say, the nation refers outside the text to the
historical reality of the Korean nation, which su}ered under Japanese
colonial rule. Furthermore, according to Tōma, the poems reflect the
total process of transformation that the Korean nation underwent under
Japanese colonial rule.
Reasoning that tradition constitutes a cultural reservoir for the nation,
Tōma ascribed the poets’ feats to the tradition of folksongs modern Korean
poetry allegedly carries on. In Tōma’s view, Korean poets struggled with
their tradition and did not break free from it. They realized that no mat-
ter how much they tried to come up with a new self free from the age-old
tradition, they could not help but return to their nation as symbolized
by the hometown in their poems. In contrast to modern Korean poetry,
modern Japanese poetry lacked such expressions of communal identity.
Tōma contended that because the Japanese middle class had grown
rapidly following the Russo-Japanese War, an increasing number of
intellectuals came from the middle class and these individuals were
instrumental in the development of modern literature. In contrast,
Korean intellectuals may have been “baptized” by modern thought but
were still under the sway of the dominant feudal norms of society. He
further reasoned that Korean intellectuals were so much under the heavy
pressure of the traditional norms of society that they must have been
envious of their Japanese counterparts because Japanese intellectuals
were more free and individualistic, that is, more modern. He went on to
conjecture that as a result Kim was moved by Kitahara Hakushū’s poetry
and asked him to write the preface to his collection of Korean folksongs.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 119
Nevertheless, Tōma argued, although Japanese intellectuals could a}ord
to be apolitical, Korean intellectuals were made politically aware as colo-
nized by colonial realities whether they liked it or not. No matter how
much they became like Japanese, they were faced daily with discrimina-
tion and prejudice and could not think of themselves apart from their
nation. Tōma asserted that however attracted they were to the greater
freedom and literary development achieved by Japanese intellectuals,
Koreans were kept away from an individualist world view in which the
Japanese were entrapped.
Tōma argued that the situation had drastically changed since the end
of the war. The confined world of Japanese intellectuals had been shat-
tered when Japanese imperialism was defeated, although its legacy lin-
gered on in the form of racial prejudice against Koreans. Tōma concluded
with a call for a united front between the masses and intellectuals under
the leadership of the proletariat to lead Japan to genuine modernity.
On the occasion of the re-publication of Tōma’s essays two years later
as a book titled Minzoku no Shi (The Poetry of a People), Kim published
his harsh refutation of Tōma’s readings in the journal Literature.19 In
the beginning of the essay, Kim revealed that Tōma had contacted him
before writing the essays. Feeling obliged as the translator of the poems
and knowing Tōma was a respected historian, Kim did his best answer-
ing Tōma’s questions but, when reading Tōma’s essays published in the
journals Japanese Literature and Literature, he could not help but feel
distraught because Tōma had almost completely ignored his input and
o}ered what Kim saw as distorted interpretations to advance his own
agenda. Kim confided in the reader that the reason he was belatedly
responding to Tōma’s essays two years after the publication of the origi-
nal essays was that, as translator, he could not tolerate any more of the
confusion Tōma’s misinterpretation would cause the Japanese readers.
Kim devoted the first half of his essay to debunking Tōma’s reading of
the two poems by Yi and Pak. Kim’s criticism was aimed at exposing how
misinformed and misleading Tōma’s interpretation of some key words
of the poems was. For example, Kim focuses on the word grave in “The
Grave of an Unknown Soul” because Tōma had anchored his reading on
the word and interpreted the poems as an elegy for a hometown irrevo-
cably changed by colonial development, which the construction of a new
road symbolized for Tōma. Kim argued that the grave the poem describes
is not the type of graves on which Tōma dwelled. He pointed out that the
grave in the poem is covered with grass, not stones and pebbles as Tōma

120 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
described it. He then asserted that this was not a grave where a lonely
traveler might stop to rest. Out of a groundless assumption about the
grave, Tōma developed his thesis on the exclusiveness of Korean rural
communities and defined colonial development as the antithesis to the
hometown. Thus, Kim contended that Tōma’s reading relying on a chain
of metonymies made no sense at all because it began with a false assump-
tion. Although Tōma explained the poem as an allegory of the violent
change an isolated village was subjected to by colonial development, in
Kim’s view, it was Tōma’s reading itself that was violent because he unjus-
tifiably and forcedly read his own agenda into the poem. Kim protested
that, in Tōma’s hands, the pathos and nostalgia for the hometown evoked
by the lyrical poem was turned into a crudely political condemnation of
Japanese colonialism.
Kim’s criticism of Tōma’s reading of “What Good Is It to Long for My
Hometown?” similarly centered around the two key words muraido (vil-
lage well) and hatsukoi (first love) on which Tōma built his argument. As
discussed above, spotlighting the importance of the village well as the
center of communal interactions, Tōma reasoned that the moving of the
well must symbolize violent change brought about by colonial develop-
ment. Similarly, first love in the poem was crucial for Tōma to di}erenti-
ate modern Korean poetry from its Japanese counterpart. Tōma argued
that first love is inseparably connected to the hometown in “What Good
Is It to Long for My Hometown?” whereas love in Kitahara Hakushū’s
poetry refers to no more than amorous feelings. Thus, the word first love
enables Tōma to highlight modern Japanese poets’ disconnection from
their hometowns.
Kim curtly responded that villagers moved their wells whenever they
deemed it to be necessary and that colonial development did not neces-
sarily have anything to do with it. Kim asked why these Korean poems
should be read as allegories of the Korean nation’s colonial experience
when similar elegies for the hometown are found all over the world.20
Kim further asserted that although Japanese colonialism could and
should be criticized for many reasons, these lyrical poems ought not be
reduced to political condemnation of Japanese colonialism.
As mentioned briefly in the beginning of this chapter, Tōma’s readings
pivoted on Kim’s less-than-faithful translations. Tōma was aware that his
readings vulnerably depended on translation and questioned why Kim
had not included in his anthology more overtly political poems equiva-
lent to Japanese proletarian poems.21 His question was, however, limited
to the range of Kim’s selection of poems in terms of their political con-

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 121
sciousness. Given the assertiveness of his arguments about the Korean
poems, Tōma did not seem suspicious of the faithfulness of Kim’s transla-
tions. However, the problem of translation was much more crucial than
Tōma may have realized. One of the key expressions on which Tōma’s
reading pivoted was one of Kim’s substitutions for the original phrase.
Here is my English translation of Pak Yongch’ŏl’s poem, which Kim
translated into Japanese under the title of “Furusato o Kohite Nanisemu”
(What good is it to long for my hometown?). As noted above, its original
title is “Kohyang” (Hometown).
hom etow n
For what shall I return to my hometown?
My family is scattered and the house is decayed.
I wonder if autumn grasses make the evening crow cry,
If the brook near the village has changed its course.
Leaving the dream of my childhood behind on top of my dear
Mother’s grave,
I went staggering on,
Following drifting clouds for ten-odd years.
For what shall I return to my hometown now?
Shall I draw new happiness on the end of the sky?
Why must I not forget what I left behind?
You, ruthless wind, blow to the full.
Where do scattered petals find their rest?
To give a thought to my hometown
Trampled underfoot by rude feet
— even in a hurried trip in a foggy dream— .
Feels like a bitter memory
About my trusty old love who was stolen away.

122 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
22
A glance at Pak’s original reveals that Kim replaced the key phrase
in the last line of the first stanza “the brook near the village” (maŭl ap
sinae) with “village well” (muraido) in his translation. Thus, Tōma based
his extended argument on Kim’s own word choice, which was not found
in the original. The original phrase does not quite support Tōma’s overall
argument because Tōma put so much emphasis on the village well as
the center of a rural community and interpreted the dislocation of the
well as the result of an irrevocable change to the village caused by colo-
nial development. Any possible correlation between the change of the
brook’s path and colonial development was much more tenuous than that
between the change of the village well’s location and colonial develop-
ment. Nor was “first love” in the last line of the fourth stanza, the other
phrase Tōma focused on, an exact translation of the original. Its literal
translation should be “past love.” The original phrase squared less with
Tōma’s argument about the hometown because “past love” could be just
one of many amorous relationships unlike “first love,” which is singular,
similar to one’s hometown.
Tōma’s interpretations of Kim’s mistranslations do not, however, en –
tirely invalidate his reading of the poem as an allegory of the Korean
national su}ering under Japanese rule. Tōma could still read the poem
allegorically even though the specific arguments he based on Kim’s re –
placements and mistranslations were less convincing once it is apparent
what alterations Kim made to the original poem. More important, that is
not the only translation-related problem at issue.
In publishing his first anthology Milky Clouds (1940), Kim altered
some of the poems he included not for literary reasons but for political
ones. To avoid conflict with the colonial authorities, he either altered or
expunged original expressions from his translations that would possibly
raise red flags with the censors. One example, as noted by the literary
critic Yu Chongho, was his problematic translation of Chŏng Chiyong’s

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 123
“Kap’e P’ŭrangsŭ” (Café France). Because this example illustrates well the
central issue of translation with regard to colonial censorship, it merits
discussion, although neither Tōma nor Kim mentioned it.23 Kim rendered
one crucial sentence, “na nŭn narado chipto ŏptanda” (I have neither coun-
try nor home), as “watashi ni wa ie mo sato mo nai” (I have neither home
nor hometown) in his Japanese translation. As Yu points out, there could
not have been any justifiable reason for the change other than Kim’s con-
cern about censorship. Put simply, Kim replaced the Korean “nara” (coun-
try) with the Japanese “sato” (home village) because he worried that the
original word might lead the censor to interpret the poem as a lamenta-
tion about the loss of Korean independence because of Japanese coloniza-
tion, if the censor had considered the sentence to refer to political reality
external to the text. Kim replaced “country” with “hometown” because he
must have thought that although the latter was metonymically associ-
ated with the former it would be regarded as a less subversive term. It
is interesting to note, in other words, that it is not unthinkable, even for
Kim, to suppose that “hometown” can fill in for “country” or even nation.
That is exactly what Tōma assumed in his reading of the Korean poems,
although, in his reading, the metonymic conversion from “hometown” to
“nation” is the reverse of Kim’s intentional mistranslation.
“Muenzuka” (The Grave of an Unknown Soul) is another instance in
which Kim preempted a political interpretation by altering the original
text. As seen in my English translation from the original poem “Irŏjin
Mudŏm” (A Grave Lost), the possessive “the mortal enemy’s” (wŏnsu ŭi),
which modifies “new road” in the first line of the third stanza, clearly
shows the narrator’s antagonism toward the road that destroyed the
grave. In his Japanese translation, however, Kim expurgated the expres-
sion and neutralized the poem’s clear antagonism toward the change
brought to the hometown.
a gr av e lost
On a solitary path
Around the mound of the north gate
There was the thick-grass-covered grave
Of an unknown soul.
Whenever a lone vagabond
Passed by,
He would sit and rest
Before the grave.

124 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
After the mortal enemy’s new road
Was built over it,
No trace of the grave is found
Anywhere.
Dirt and grass
Covering the grave
Turned into a road
Tramped over and over,
Are now singing
A sorrowful old song
Whenever heavy footprints are
Left on them.
Here was
The grave of an unknown soul
Where a drifting passerby
Used to rest nearby.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 125
24
By calling attention to Kim’s surreptitious alteration of the original
texts, however, I do not intend to criticize his self-censoring and def-
erence to the Japanese government. What is at issue is Kim’s attitude
toward translation in general and his refutation of Tōma’s political read-
ing in particular. In the afterword of Milky Clouds, his 1940 anthology
on which the postwar Korean Poetry Anthology was based, Kim remarked
that although ideally the poetry translator should not take translated
poems as his own, he himself had failed to achieve such a state of mind.
He even confessed that the anthology amounted to a collection of his own
poetry. He nevertheless refused to be apologetic because he reasoned that
apologizing for his mistakes implied that he would not do the same thing
again, but, he declared, he could not help but do it over and over again as
long as he was translating Korean poetry.25 As noted above, when pub-
lishing the postwar anthology, Kim did not revise the translations origi-
nally included in Milky Clouds. The three poems discussed here were
originally translated for the first anthology and were included without
revision in the postwar anthology.
In his afterword to the 1943 version of Korean Poetry Anthology, Kim
revealed that he had abandoned a translation of No Ch’ŏnmyŏng’s poem
“Puni,” which depicts a mother’s sorrow over Puni, the daughter she has
lost, because the poem resisted Kim’s e}orts to transfer its sentiments
into Japanese even though he was very much moved by it and eager to
translate it.26 He seemed to imply that if an original text resists a transla-
tor’s will to render it appropriately in the target language, the translator
should not force it into translation. Although this notion appeared to tes-
tify to Kim’s respect for the integrity of the original text, what it actually
revealed was that the poems Kim translated were those that, in his eyes,
surrendered to his will. This attitude of Kim’s toward his translations
o}ers a clue to understanding his absolute rejection of Tōma’s political
reading of them. For him, those poems were as much his own literary
works as the poets’. In his mind, he absolutely knew the authorial inten-
tions because the poems translated into Japanese were almost his own
literary creations. When he asserted that the anthology was his, the pos-
sessive “his” was purely possessive. His assertion did not indicate any

126 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
willingness to face up to any inevitable injustice he had done to the origi-
nal. Kim’s attitude toward his translations lacks self-reflectivity. Put dif-
ferently, his view on translation did not recognize the alterity inscribed
in the original, which no translator can domesticate.
encounter ing the other
However problematic Kim’s views on translation were, he did raise
important issues relevant to any meaningful discussion on postcolonial
encounters between the former colonizers and colonized in the realm
of culture. As mentioned earlier, he demanded to know why the Korean
poems should be read as allegories of the Koreans’ colonial experience
when similar elegies for one’s hometown are common in other countries,
too. He wanted to know why Tōma reduced the universal feeling of nos-
talgia for one’s lost hometown expressed in the poetry to the particularity
of Koreans’ historical experience. In other words, Kim questioned why
the history of colonial experience should be the ultimate hermeneutical
horizon on which the interpretation of the Korean poetry is placed.
Another point that deserves our attention is Kim’s protest at Tōma’s
representation of Koreans and Korean culture. In denouncing Tōma’s inad-
equate knowledge about Korean culture and literature, Kim was criticizing
the general tendency he found among Japanese intellectuals to represent
Korean culture based on superficial observation. Kim o}ered one example
of such violent representation: He reported that he had once read an article
in the tanka poetry journal Shinjin (Man of Truth) about certain peculiari-
ties of the Korean language. The article informed its readers that Koreans
say “feeding a clock” instead of “winding a clock” and they use “saw rice”
(topap) and “plane rice” (taep’aepap) to refer to sawdust and wood shavings.
From this observation, the author concluded that the verb expression “to
eat” appears in so many idiomatic expressions in the Korean language that
it must reflect Koreans’ obsession with food. Kim responded sarcastically
to such a crude reasoning about the Korean psyche by asking rhetori-
cally whether the Japanese are cannibalistic because they say “that guy is
inedible” (kuenai yatsu) to mean “he is devious” and say “telling a story of
having eaten a man” (hito o kutta hanashi) to mean “telling a tall tale.”27
Kim’s protest at the Japanese representation of Korean culture bears on
his criticism of Tōma’s reading of Korean poetry, because one of the main
complaints Kim lodged against Tōma was that the latter put forth wild
speculations about the poems on the basis of fragmented pieces of infor-
mation and superficial knowledge about Korean literature and culture.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 127
Tōma responded quickly to Kim’s criticism in an essay titled “Gendai
Chōsen Bungaku no Hitotsu no Mikata” (One Perspective on Modern
Korean Literature) published two months later in Literature, in August
1956.28 Tōma argued that once a literary work leaves the hands of its
author, the critic should respect the reader’s interpretation as long as it
is reasonable even if the critic believes it to be contrary to the author’s
intention. Tōma’s response itself, however, is not helpful for duly exam-
ining the issues raised by Kim.
To fully comprehend the theoretical implications of the issues, I enlist
Jameson’s essay on non– Western literature, one of the very few attempts
to construct a general theory of non– Western literary texts. It was first
and foremost an endeavor to grapple with the unease so-called First-
World intellectuals have with the radical di}erence of the Third World.
In Jameson’s essay, the “Third World” refers to the formerly colonized and
semicolonized nations in Asia and Africa, the conditions of which are in
contrast to those of the First World, that is, advanced capitalist countries
most of which were former colonial powers.29 In the very beginning of
his essay, Jameson remarked that Third-World intellectuals are obsessed
with the collective identity of their nations. He summed up the way in
which First-World intellectuals feel perplexed about that di}erence in
the following sentences: “This is not the way American intellectuals have
been discussing ‘America,’ and indeed one might feel that the whole mat-
ter is nothing but that old thing called ‘nationalism,’ long since liquidated
here and rightly so.”30
Jameson traced the origin of Western intellectuals’ unease with
national identity to the split between the private and the public entrenched
in the advanced capitalist society of the West. Western culture is over-
determined by a series of splits between the private and the public, the
poetic and the political, and the psychic subject and the social subject.
These splits ultimately result from the capitalist mode of production, the
development of which inheres in Western countries and Japan, an excep-
tional non– Western First-World country.31 In contrast, such splits have
not yet pervaded Third-World culture because Third-World countries
have encountered capitalism as an encroachment on their societies from
outside. Put di}erently, the trajectory of the Third World’s encounter
with capitalism is the history of colonialism. Because of the history of
colonial experience, Third-World literary texts, even when telling private
stories with a strongly libidinal dimension, necessarily allegorize “the
embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”32
Jameson gallantly endeavored to o}er a sympathetic view of non–

128 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
Western literature, looking beyond culture to the structural base that
determines the production of literary texts in the last instance and
debunking the claustrophobic self-referentiality of texts, the interpretive
strategy that, in his judgment, dominates Western literary criticism.33
Certainly, Jameson o}ered a much more nuanced argument than a
crudely reductive reading of literary texts as the transparent reflection
of colonial experience, and it would do a disservice to him if his notion of
“national allegory” were lumped with Tōma’s reductive reading strategy.
Nevertheless, it is also undeniable that Jameson’s essay resonates with
Tōma’s essays in that, for both Jameson and Tōma, colonial history con-
stitutes the ultimate hermeneutic horizon on which the interpretation of
literature produced in former colonies should be carried out. Furthermore,
Jameson’s essay operates on a desire structurally parallel to that which
propels Tōma’s essays. As mentioned above, Tōma found a strong con-
nection between intellectuals and the masses in modern Korean poetry
and lamented the lack of such awareness of collective identity in modern
Japanese literature. In a similar vein, Jameson’s essay seeks to locate a
bond between politics and poetics as well as between the public and the
private in literature identified as other than his own while supposing
such a bond, much like the lost innocence of the past, disappeared from
Western literature with the advent of modernism, a loss that, needless to
say, Jameson regarded as his own.
As Marxists, both Tōma and Jameson were concerned with modern
individuals’ alienation from human beings’ natural sociality. Whereas
Tōma privileged the nation as the manifestation of such sociality, Jame-
son certainly did not have such strong faith in the nation or, for that mat-
ter, in a collective identity. Nevertheless, Jameson ultimately recognized
the political value of such a collective identity, which he observed many
Third-World intellectuals invoke for revolutionary causes.34 Jameson
could not agree more on Tōma’s view that the primary role of intellectuals
in society is political. Both consider the political to involve envisioning
utopian possibilities denied us by the current capitalistic system. Finally,
although both Tōma and Jameson depended absolutely on translation for
their readings of Korean poetry and Third-World literature, respectively,
neither gave much thought to the implications of relying on translation.
In his scathing response to Jameson’s article, Aijaz Ahmad thus com-
plained that Jameson’s argument cannot apply to most Third-World texts,
as they are not available in Western languages.35
The problem of translation, however, is more than the limited avail-
ability of non– Western literary texts in Western languages. Translation

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 129
presupposes the presence of the other in the first place, whom the self
cannot understand on its own and which bring the self ’s understanding
into question. The necessity of translation thus reminds us of that ulti-
mately unbridgeable distance from the other. I suspect the lack of concern
about translation in both Tōma and Jameson shows symptomatically
their fear of encountering the truly radical di}erence of the other that
resists appropriation.
By keeping the parallels between Tōma and Jameson in focus, it is
possible to recognize that one important aspect of the controversies over
both Tōma’s essays and Jameson’s argument is the relationship between
the self and the other. The problem of Jameson’s essay most relevant to
this discussion is that when encountering the radical di}erence of the
other, his essay suggests, there is no choice other than to settle for either
the appropriation of radical di}erence or liberal and humanistic univer-
salism. Jameson acknowledged that his call for reading Third-World lit-
erature as national allegory inevitably domesticates the radical di}erence
of the other even though it aims to positively evaluate rather than to
devalue non– Western literature. Nevertheless, he accepted fatalistically
such epistemological violence as an inevitable course in encountering the
other because he does not “know how a first-world intellectual can avoid
this operation without falling back into some general liberal and human-
istic universalism” other than to resort to some sort of orientalism, in
Said’s sense, which inevitably reifies di}erence as a tangible quality.36
What Jameson accepted as unavoidable epistemological violence de –
serves careful examination. The argument can be pushed further, to the
point where it intersects with the recurrent problem of representation in
the Western philosophical tradition. If the experiencing subject has no
direct but merely indirect access to reality through representation alone,
then the irreparable gap between reality and its representation always
poses the question of epistemological violence because, no matter how
faithfully that representation corresponds to reality, the two are not iden-
tical, and reality is always presented as other than itself through repre-
sentation. If that is the case, the problem of representation is never lim-
ited to the appropriation of the other’s radical di}erence, but it pertains
to perception and the conceptualization of every single object, which is
brought to consciousness from outside.
The problem of representation in epistemology has been tackled by
numerous philosophers among whom Kant stands out for an enduring
legacy still strongly felt in many disciplines within the humanities. Kant
introduced the transcendental subject to ensure the possibility of objec-

130 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
tive knowledge about the external world outside of the subject. According
to Kant, we human beings can have objective knowledge about the world
because we are equipped with the a priori faculty of understanding,
although we still do not have direct access to things in themselves and
only know the phenomena, objects as structured by the faculty of under-
standing. Kant’s e}orts might not be satisfactory enough to ward o}
the accusation against Western philosophy of epistemological violence,
especially when it is necessary to tackle the issue of encountering the
radical di}erence of the other. Among various possible objections to and
reservations about Kant’s transcendental philosophy, what is particularly
relevant to this discussion is the concern about whether the transcenden-
tal subject Kant introduced can constitute a universally objective vantage
point or coincide only with the perspective of an 18th-century European
male cultural elite. Put di}erently, one might argue that the transcenden-
tal subject cannot be completely insulated from all the conventions and
customs, let alone prejudices and ignorance, of the particular time and
place in which the empirical subject is placed. For example, the categories,
the pure concepts of the faculty of understanding in Kant’s epistemol-
ogy, are derived from Aristotle’s 10 classifications of terms originating
in ancient Greece, although, within Kant’s framework, the categories
inhere a priori in humans as rational beings regardless of their particular
attributes.
Even if the ways in which we make sense of the world are primarily
determined by the conventions of the communities to which we happen
to belong, our epistemological dependence on communal norms itself will
not deal a detrimental blow to the general validity of representation as
long as we interact only with those from our own communities, because
how to experience reality, that is, how to represent things outside of the
subject, is securely anchored in each community’s shared norms. The
real problem arises only when the self encounters the other with radical
di}erence: How can the self conceptualize and articulate the di}erence
without assimilating it into something familiar and understandable to
the self? The problem goes further. Because the other does not share the
same epistemological substratum with the self, the self ’s representation of
radical di}erence always eludes the other. The other thus calls into ques-
tion the ways in which the self sees the radical di}erence between itself
and the other. When the other approaches the self and disrupts the self ’s
complacency, it emerges as the other, the other with radical di}erence.
It goes without saying that no community in reality can impose norms
on its members to such an absolute degree that the shared norms exhaus-

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 131
tively dictate the ways in which its members perceive and conceive the
world. There exists no such completely homogeneous community, and
every community is fractured from the beginning regardless of its size.
As a consequence, the other, the other with radical di}erence, does not
necessarily come from outside of any given community and might come
from within.
To envision an alternative way of encountering the radical di}erence
of the other, I turn to Levinas. Levinas suggests that when encountering
the other, the alterity of the other subjects the self to constant reflection
on the harm the self does to the other and thus makes the self vulnerable
to the call from the other to be ethical. What makes such an encounter
possible, according to Levinas, is the self ’s desire for the other coming in
need, that is, the other, whom the self cannot appropriate in the self ’s own
image. This desire, however, does not ensue from the egoistic claim of the
self. On the contrary, it comes along with the self ’s shame, which brings
the self ’s legitimacy into question. As the self ’s desire for the other, as
long as it is a desire, is insatiable, the self ’s obligation to the other cannot
be exhausted. Only through constant ethical vigilance can a person con-
firm subjectivity. There is no logical and chronological priority granted
to the constitution of subjectivity over one’s ethical relationship with the
other. In Levinasian ethics, the subjectivity emerges to be ethical with
the other, not to hypostatize the identity of sameness.37 Levinasian ethics
is helpful for understanding the problem of the other underlying Tōma’s
reading of Korean poetry as well as at the core of Jameson’s reading of
Third-World literature.
Certainly, it was laudable that Tōma made an e}ort to understand the
culture of Korea, Japan’s former colony, and to build solidarity between
the former colonized and the people of the former colonizer in their
fight against the structures of colonial domination lingering on in East
Asia. However, such solidarity should be premised on the recognition of
radical di}erence between the two, and it is questionable whether Tōma’s
endeavor measured up to such an exacting demand.
Even though Tōma started his essays with an emphasis on the dif-
ference of modern Korean poetry from its Japanese counterpart, which
resulted from the history of Koreans’ colonial experience, such di}erence,
in the end, proves to be not absolute but rather is appropriable because
Tōma placed Japan, which he saw as a virtual colony under postwar
American hegemony, on the same footing with Korea, a former colony of
Japan. In other words, Tōma initially highlighted the di}erence of Korean
poetry only to emphasize the importance of Japanese collective identity

132 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
as a nation. Thus, when Tōma urged Japanese intellectuals to emulate
their Korean counterparts’ allegiance to the collective identity of their
own nation, he risked appropriating the di}erence of Koreans for the
a�rmation of the Japanese self-sameness and losing sight of their alter-
ity with its origins in historical di}erences between their experiences of
colonialism.
In considering the historical di}erence between the former coloniz-
ers and colonized, what especially pertains to this discussion is Levinas’s
notion of eschatology because it o}ers a way of recounting the past alter-
natively to history, which is seminal to both Tōma’s reading of Korean
poetry and Jameson’s reading of Third-World literature. Levinas is criti-
cal of history, which tends to totalize di}erent individuals’ singular expe-
riences into “a coherent discourse.”38 According to Levinas, individuals
in history are deprived of their own voices and presented only “in the
third person.” Thus, the judgment of history is a trial in absentia. It is
inattentive to the unseen su}erings of individuals. To uphold justice, the
individual should be present at that trial not only to give testimony but
also to apologize if necessary.
No one can, however, testify indefinitely because every person is sub-
ject to the violence of death. The voices of the dead can be approached
only through their work, the products of their labor, which is, in turn,
vulnerable to the interpretations of those who survive. Thus, the past is
appropriated by and consumed for the victors, the survivors in history.
An individual can be free from the totalization of history only in the
individual’s interiority, which separates the individual from the totality.
Interiority is what grants the individual subjectivity. As a consequence,
Levinas appeared to argue that the ethical relationship with the other
takes place outside history.39
Nevertheless, I argue that Levinas did not completely rule out the pos-
sibility of an ethical way of recounting the past. History is callous to the
invisible sorrow and pain of individuals. However, the invisible that is
outside of history manifests itself when those from the past are welcomed
as the other, as strangers who summon the self to be ethical. When the
self stops appropriating, taming, and domesticating the other’s alterity
for its own benefit, it steps out of history. Then, individuals’ fear of death
that deprives them of a voice in the judgment of history becomes the
concern that that individual might annihilate the alterity of the other.40
At that moment emerges the possibility of an ethical recounting of the
past. This is what Levinas called eschatology. Past events are no longer
framed in a certain way so that they can serve to legitimize the present.

Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents / 133
In eschatology, each individual is given a chance to speak for him- or her-
self. The erratic and incoherent stories of individual experience are not
sacrificed for the teleological narrative of history. Every sigh and mur-
mur is heard. However, the eschatological judgment does not allow an
individual to speak whatever he or she wants. The alterity of the other is
paramount over the self ’s freedom in eschatology. The totality of history
breaks down and the di}erence of an individual stands out in eschatol-
ogy, revealing that an individual being has an infinity that the totality of
history cannot encompass.41 Eschatology is thus radically di}erent from
both Tōma’s conventional Marxist history and Jameson’s “History as the
Real,” which is indirectly accessible only through narration but nonethe-
less determinant in the production of texts.42 Eschatology does not nar-
rate past events in relation to the present.
One might ask whether it is possible to think of eschatology without
acknowledging the presence of God. Is eschatology nothing but a theo-
logical view of history? The eschatology in the Levinasian sense does not
necessarily presuppose the presence of omnipotent and omnipresent God
who tells the good from the bad. However, the concept of eschatology is
certainly meaningless without the possibility of redemption. In eschatol-
ogy, an individual is given a chance to be redeemed from the loss of the
past, which is condemned to oblivion in history.43
Then how does eschatology materialize as a discourse? Through
memory, according to Levinas. It is imperative to remember the sorrow
and pain of those of the past. However, such remembrance should not be
aimed at ironing out the wrinkles of the past for the benefit of the sur-
vivors in the present.44 Memory is not to interiorize the past within one
who remembers in the present. Remembering the past involves patiently
lending an ear to the sighs and murmurs of the past even though they
may be incoherent and unreasonable to the self and exceed the self ’s
totalizing comprehension of the past. Eschatological remembrance does
not constitute a volitional or spontaneous act on the part of the self, which
would suggest the self ’s supremacy as the transcendental ego. If the self
was such a transcendental ego, it would suppress the alterity of the past
by synthesizing the erratic contours of an individual’s lived experience
of the past into the coherent narrative of history.45 The past cannot be
brought back to be present or even represented in the consciousness of
the ego through the act of remembrance issuing from the ego’s freedom.
In remembering what concretely happened in the past, the self is rather
being haunted by the memory of the past as a trace, the absolute absence,
which establishes the self ’s relationship with the past as the other and

134 / Translation and Its Postcolonial Discontents
thus enables the constitution of the self as the ethical subject. As saying
disrupts the said and ethics unsettles politics as discussed in the preced-
ing chapters, eschatology thus interrupts and disjoints history, which,
claiming to conjure up the past as presence within the consciousness of
the ego, confirms the ego’s totalizing cognitive power. Certainly, it is
impossible to face all the concrete details of the past. However, it is pos-
sible to move closer to the ethical by struggling to remember in response
to the call from the other, despite the impossibility of the task.
This insight from Levinas points to the possibility of solidarity
between the former colonized and colonizer in protest against colonial
domination. Eschatology serves to keep the people of the former colonizer
vulnerable and responsive to the ethical call from the former colonized,
the victims of colonial violence. Only through responding to the call is
it possible to avoid the problem of appropriating the radical di}erence
of the former colonized. The exacting demand on former colonizers to
constantly be alert to the alterity of the former colonized might be mis-
taken for the Manichean world view on which colonial domination itself
relies. However the ethical attention to the di}erence between former
colonizers and colonized need not involve any essentialist identification
premised on race, ethnicity, culture, language, or nationality as already
discussed in Chapter 2. Having originated in colonial domination and its
unceasing di}erentiation between colonized and colonizer as it institutes
discrimination against the former in favor of the latter, di}erence is what
constitutes the alterity of the former colonized.
The controversy over Tōma’s essays on Korean poetry is indication of
just how hard a task respecting the alterity of the other is. Even conscien-
tious people in a former colonizing power need to be constantly alert to
the risk that their good will may lead them to appropriate the radical
di}erence of the postcolonial other.

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad
Source: Social Text, No. 1

7

(Autumn, 1987), pp. 3-25
Published by: Duke University Press
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Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the
“National Allegory”

AIJAZ AHMAD

In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capital,”:’ I find myself in an awkward position. If I were
to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today whose work I generally
hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson. The plea that gener-
ates most of the passion in his text-that the teaching of literature in the US academy
be informed by a sense not only of “western” literature but of “world literature”; that
the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of domin-
ant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity-is of course

entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the range of sympathies, he

brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands.
Yet this plea for syllabus reform-even his marvelously erudite reading of Lu

Xun and Ousmane-is conflated with, indeed superseded by, a much more ambitious

undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is explicitly announced only in
the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of “a theory of the cognitive
aesthetics of third-world literature.” This “cognitive aesthetics” rests, in turn, upon a

suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the
advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations. We have, instead, a

binary opposition of what Jameson calls the “first” and the “third” worlds. It is in
this passage from a plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation of a “cognitive
aesthetics” that most of the text’s troubles lie. These troubles are, I might add, quite
numerous.

There is doubtless a personal, somewhat existential side to my encounter with
this text, which is best clarified at the outset. I have been reading Jameson’s work now
for roughly fifteen years, and at least some of what I know about the literatures and
cultures of Western Europe and the US comes from him; and because I am a marxist,

I

had always thought of us, Jameson and myself, as birds of the same feather even

though we never quite flocked together. But, then, when I was on the fifth page of this
text (specifically, on the sentence starting with “All third-world texts are necessar-

ily. . .” etc.), I realized that what was being theorised was, among many other things,

‘Social Text #

15

(Fall 1986), pp. 65-88.

3

Aijaz Ahmad

myself. Now, I was born in India and I am a Pakistani citizen; I write poetry in Urdu,
a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So, I said to myself:
“All? . . . necessarily ?” It felt odd. Matters got much more curious, however. For, the
farther I read the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for
so long, so affectionately, even though from a physical distance, taken as a comrade
was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a good feeling.

I

I too think that there are plenty of very good books written by African, Asian
and Latin American writers which are available in English and which must be taught
as an antidote against the general ethnocentricity and cultural myopia of the
humanities as they are presently constituted in these United States. If some label is
needed for this activity, one may call it “third-world literature.” Conversely, however,
I also hold that this phrase, “the third world,” is, even in its most telling deployments,
a polemical one, with no theoretical status whatsoever. Polemic surely has a promi-
nent place in all human discourses, especially in the discourse of politics, so the use of
this phrase in loose, polemical contexts is altogether permissible. But to lift the phrase
from the register of polemics and claim it as a basis for producing theoretical knowl-
edge, which presumes a certain rigor in constructing the objects of one’s knowledge,
is to misconstrue not only the phrase itself but even the world to which it refers. I
shall argue, therefore, that there is no such thing as a “third-world literature” which
can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge. There
are fundamental issues-of periodisation, social and linguistic formations, political
and ideological struggles within the field of literary production, and so on-which
simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether positivist
reductionism.

The mere fact, for example, that languages of the metropolitan countries have
not been adopted by the vast majority of the producers of literature in Asia and Africa
means that the vast majority of literary texts from those continents are unavailable in
the metropoles, so that a literary theorist who sets out to formulate “a theory of the
cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” shall be constructing ideal-types, in the
Weberian manner, duplicating all the basic procedures which orientalist scholars
have historically deployed in presenting their own readings of a certain tradition of
“high” textuality as the knowledge of a supposedly unitary object which they call
“the Islamic civilization.” I might add that literary relations between the metropoli-
tan countries and the imperialised formations are constructed very differently than
they are among the metropolitan countries themselves. Rare would be a literary
theorist in Europe or the US who does not command a couple of European languages
other than his/her own; and the frequency of translation, back and forth, among

4

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

European languages creates very fulsome circuits for the circulation of texts, so that
even a US scholar who does not command much beyond English can be quite well

grounded in the various metropolitan traditions.

Linguistic and literary relations between the metropolitan countries and the
countries of Asia and Africa, on the other hand, offer three sharp contrasts to this

system. Rare would be a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa who does not know at
least one European language; equally rare would be, on the other side, a major
literary theorist in Europe or the United States who has ever bothered with an Asian
or African language; and the enormous industry of translation which circulates texts

among the advanced capitalist countries comes to the most erratic and slowest possi-
ble grind when it comes to translation from Asian or African languages. The upshot
is that major literary traditions-such as those of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and
half a dozen others from India alone-remain, beyond a few texts here and there,
virtually unknown to the American literary theorist. Consequently, the few writers
who happen to write in English are valorized beyond measure. Witness, for example,
the characterization of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the New York Times
as “a Continent finding its voice”-as if one has no voice if one does not speak in

English. Or, Richard Poirier’s praise for Edward Said in Raritan Quarterly which
now adorns the back cover of his latest book: “It is Said’s great accomplishment that
thanks to his book, Palestinians will never be lost to history.” This is the upside-down
world of the camera obscura: not that Said’s vision is itself framed by the Palestinian

experience but that Palestine would have no place in history without Said’s book! The
retribution visited upon the head of an Asian, an African, an Arab intellectual who is
of any consequence and who writes in English is that he/she is immediately elevated
to the lonely splendour of a “representative”-of a race, a continent, a civilization,
even the “third world.” It is in this general context that a “cognitive theory of
third-world literature” based upon what is currently available in languages of the

metropolitan countries becomes, to my mind, an alarming undertaking.
I shall return to some of these points presently, especially to the point about the

epistemological impossibility of a “third-world literature.” Since, however, Jameson’s
own text is so centrally grounded in a binary opposition between a first and a third

world, it is impossible to proceed with an examination of his particular propositions
regarding the respective literary traditions without first asking whether or not this
characterization of the world is itself theoretically tenable, and whether, therefore, an
accurate conception of literature can be mapped out on the basis of this binary
opposition. I shall argue later that since Jameson defines the so-called third world in
terms of its “experience of colonialism and imperialism,” the political category that

necessarily follows from this exclusive emphasis is that of “the nation,” with
nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology; and, because of this privileging of
the nationalist ideology, it is then theoretically posited that “all third-world texts are

5

Aijaz Ahmad

necessarily … to be read as … national allegories.” The theory of the “national

allegory” as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory
which permeates the whole of Jameson’s own text. We too have to begin, then, with
some comments on “the third world” as a theoretical category and on “nationalism”
as the necessary, exclusively desirable ideology.

II

Jameson seems aware of the difficulties in conceptualising the global dispersion
of powers and populations in terms of his particular variant of the Three Worlds

Theory (“I take the point of criticism,” he says). And, after reiterating the basic

premise of that theory (“the capitalist first world”; “the socialist bloc of the second
world”; and “countries that have suffered colonialism and imperialism”), he does

clarify that he does not uphold the specifically Maoist theory of “convergence”
between the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest of the difficulty in holding
this view of the world is elided, however, with three assertions: that he cannot find a

“comparable expression”; that he is deploying these terms in “an essentially descrip-
tive way”; and that the criticisms are at any rate not “relevant.” The problem of

“comparable expression” is a minor matter, which we shall ignore; “relevance,” on
the other hand, is the central issue and I shall deal with it presently. First, however, I
want to comment briefly on the matter of “description.”

More than most critics writing in the US today, Jameson should know that when
it comes to a knowledge of the world, there is no such thing as a category of the

“essentially descriptive”; that “description” is never ideologically or cognitively neu-

tral; that to “describe” is to specify a locus of meaning, to construct an object of

knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that shall be bound by that act of descriptive
construction. “Description” has been central, for example, in the colonial discourse.
It was by assembling a monstrous machinery of descriptions-of our bodies, our

speech-acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics, our socialities and
sexualities-in fields as various as ethnology, fiction, photography, linguistics, politi-
cal science-that the colonial discourse was able to classify and ideologically master
the colonial subject, enabling itself to transform the descriptively verifiable multiplic-
ity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value. To say, in short, that
what one is presenting is “essentially descriptive” is to assert a level of facticity which
conceals its own ideology and to prepare a ground from which judgments of classifi-
cation, generalisation and value can be made.

As we get to the substance of what Jameson “describes,” I find it significant that
first and second worlds are defined in terms of their production systems (capitalism
and socialism, respectively), whereas the third category-the third world-is defined

purely in terms of an “experience” of externally inserted phenomena. That which is

6

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

constitutive of human history itself is present in the first two cases, absent in the third
one. Ideologically, this classification divides the world between those who make

history and those who are mere objects of it; elsewhere in the text, Jameson would

significantly re-invoke Hegel’s famous description of the master/slave relation to

encapsulate the first/third world opposition. But analytically, this classification leaves
the so-called third world in a limbo; if only the first world is capitalist and the second
world socialist, how does one understand the third world? Is it pre-capitalist? Transi-
tional? Transitional between what and what?

But then there is also the issue of the location of particular countries within the
various “worlds.” Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is nostalgically rehashed
on US television screens in copious series every few months, but the India of today has
all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalised commodity production,
vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agriculture and industry but also
between Departments I and II of industry itself, technical personnel more numerous
than that of France and Germany combined, and a gross industrial product twice as

large as that of Britain. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism, and the conditions of
life for over half of the Indian population (roughly 400 million people) are considera-

bly worse than what Engels described in Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But India’s steel industry did celebrate its hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and
the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the fastest growing in the
world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. This
economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary rule of the

bourgeoisie since independence in 1947, a record quite comparable to the length of

Italy’s modern record of unbroken bourgeois-democratic governance, and superior to
the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of the oldest colonising
countries. This parliamentary republic of the bourgeoisie in India has not been
without its own lawlessnesses and violences, of a kind and degree now not normal in

Japan or Western Europe, but a bourgeois political subjectivity has been created for
the populace at large. The corollary on the left is that the two communist parties (CPI
and CPM) have longer and more extensive experience of regional government, within
the republic of the bourgeoisie, than all the eurocommunist parties combined, and the
electorate that votes ritually for these two parties is probably larger than the com-
munist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world.

So, does India belong in the first world or the third? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico,
South Africa? And .. .? But we know that countries of the Pacific rim, from South
Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastest growing region within global capitalism.
The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary opposition which

Jameson constructs between a capitalist first world and a presumably pre- or non-

capitalist third world is empirically ungrounded.

7

Aijaz Ahmad

III

I have said already that if one believes in the Three Worlds Theory, hence in a
“third world” defined exclusively in terms of “the experience of colonialism and

imperialism,” then the primary ideological formation available to a leftwing intellec-
tual shall be that of nationalism; it will then be possible to assert, surely with very
considerable exaggeration but nonetheless, that “all third-world texts are necessarily
… national allegories” (emphases in the original). This exclusive emphasis on the
nationalist ideology is there even in the opening paragraph of Jameson’s text where
the only choice for the “third world” is said to be between its “nationalisms” and a

“global American postmodernist culture.” Is there no other choice? Could not one

join the “second world,” for example? There used to be, in the marxist discourse, a

thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was neither nationalist nor

postmodernist. Has that vanished from our discourse altogether, even as the name of
a desire?

Jameson’s haste in totalising historical phenomena in terms of binary opposi-
tions (nationalism/postmodernism, in this case) leaves little room for the fact, for

instance, that the only nationalisms in the so-called third world which have been able
to resist US cultural pressure and have actually produced any alternatives are the ones
which are already articulated to and assimilated within the much larger field of
socialist political practice. Virtually all others have had no difficulty in reconciling
themselves with what Jameson calls “global American postmodernist culture”; in the

singular and sizeable case of Iran (which Jameson forbids us to mention on the

grounds that it is “predictable” that we shall do so), the anti-communism of the
Islamic nationalists has produced not social regeneration but clerical fascism. Nor
does the absolutism of that opposition (postmodernism/nationalism) permit any
space for the simple idea that nationalism itself is not some unitary thing with some

pre-determined essence and value. There are hundreds of nationalisms in Asia and
Africa today; some are progressive, others are not. Whether or not a nationalism will

produce a progressive cultural practice depends, to put it in Gramscian terms, upon
the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it and utilises it, as a
material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony. There is neither
theoretical ground nor empirical evidence to support the notion that bourgeois
nationalisms of the so-called third world will have any difficulty with postmodern-
ism; they want it.

Yet, there is a very tight fit between the Three Worlds Theory, the over-valoriza-
tion of the nationalist ideology, and the assertion that “national allegory” is the

primary, even exclusive, form of narrativity in the so-called third world. If this “third
world” is constituted by the singular “experience of colonialism and imperialism,”
and if the only possible response is a nationalist one, then what else is there that is

8

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

more urgent to narrate than this “experience”; in fact, there is nothing else to
narrate. For, if societies here are defined not by relations of production but by
relations of intra-national domination; if they are forever suspended outside the

sphere of conflict between capitalism (first world) and socialism (second world); if the

motivating force for history here is neither class formation and class struggle nor the

multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region
and so on, but the unitary “experience” of national oppression (if one is merely the
object of history, the Hegelian slave) then what else can one narrate but that national

oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all. Formally, we are fated to be in the

poststructuralist world of repetition with difference; the same allegory, the nationalist

one, re-written, over and over again, until the end of time: “all third-world texts are

necessarily. . .”

I

V

But one could start with a radically different premise, namely the proposition
that we live not in three worlds but in one; that this world includes the experience of
colonialism and imperialism on both sides of Jameson’s global divide (the “experi-
ence” of imperialism is a central fact of all aspects of life inside the US from ideologi-
cal formation to the utilisation of the social surplus in military-industrial complexes);
that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much constituted by the
division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist countries; that socialism
is not restricted to something called the second world but is simply the name of a
resistance that saturates the globe today, as capitalism itself does; that the different

parts of the capitalist system are to be known not in terms of a binary opposition but
as a contradictory unity, with differences, yes, but also with profound overlaps. One
immediate consequence for literary theory would be that the unitary search for “a

theory of cognitive aesthetics for third-world literature” would be rendered impossi-
ble, and one would have to forego the idea of a meta-narrative that encompasses all
the fecundity of real narratives in the so-called third world. Conversely, many of the

questions that one would ask about, let us say, Urdu or Bengali traditions of literature

may turn out to be rather similar to the questions one has asked previously about

English/American literatures. By the same token, a real knowledge of those other
traditions may force US literary theorists to ask questions about their own tradition
which they have heretofore not asked.

Jameson claims that one cannot proceed from the premise of a real unity of the
world “without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism.”
That is a curious idea, coming from a marxist. One should have thought that the
world was united not by liberalist ideology-that the world was not at all constituted
in the realm of an Idea, be it Hegelian or humanist-but by the global operation of a

9

Aijaz Ahmad

single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the global resistance to this

mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe.
Socialism, one should have thought, was not by any means limited to the so-called
second world (the socialist countries) but a global phenomenon, reaching into the
farthest rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, not to speak of indi-
viduals and groups within the United States. What gives the world its unity, then, is
not a humanist ideology but the ferocious struggle of capital and labor which is now

strictly and fundamentally global in character. The prospect of a socialist revolution
has receded so much from the practical horizon of so much of the metropolitan left
that the temptation for the US left intelligentsia is to forget the ferocity of that basic

struggle which in our time transcends all others. The advantage of coming from

Pakistan, in my own case, is that the country is saturated with capitalist com-

modities, bristles with US weaponry, borders on China, the Soviet Union and Af-

ghanistan, suffers from a proliferation of competing nationalisms, and is currently
witnessing the first stage in the consolidation of the communist movement. It is

difficult, coming from there, to forget that primary motion of history which gives to
our globe its contradictory unity: a notion that has nothing to do with liberal
humanism.

As for the specificity of cultural difference, Jameson’s theoretical conception
tends, I believe, in the opposite direction, namely, that of homogenisation. Difference
between the first world and the third is absolutised as an Otherness, but the enormous
cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called third world is sub-

merged within a singular identity of “experience.” Now, countries of Western Europe
and North America have been deeply tied together over roughly the last two hundred

years; capitalism itself is so much older in these countries; the cultural logic of late

capitalism is so strongly operative in these metropolitan formations; the circulation of
cultural products among them is so immediate, so extensive, so brisk that one could

sensibly speak of a certain cultural homegeneity among them. But Asia, Africa, and
Latin America? Historically, these countries were never so closely tied together; Peru
and India simply do not have a common history of the sort that Germany and France,
or Britain and the United States, have; not even the singular “experience of colonial-
ism and imperialism” has been in specific ways same or similar in, say, India and
Namibia. These various countries, from the three continents, have been assimilated
into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly
differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the me-

tropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations. Circuits of exchange
among them are rudimentary at best; an average Nigerian who is literate about his
own country would know infinitely more about England and the United States than
about any country of Asia or Latin America or indeed about most countries of Africa.
The kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of the advanced capitalist

10

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

countries simply do not exist among countries of backward capitalism, and

capitalism itself, which is dominant but not altogether universalised, does not yet
have the same power of homogenisation in its cultural logic in most of these countries,
except among the urban bourgeoisie.

Of course, great cultural similarities also exist among countries that occupy
analogous positions in the global capitalist system, and there are similarities in many
cases that have been bequeathed by the similarities of socio-economic structures in
the pre-capitalist past. The point is not to construct a typology that is simply the
obverse of Jameson’s, but rather to define the material basis for a fair degree of
cultural homogenisation among the advanced capitalist countries and the lack of that
kind of homogenisation in the rest of the capitalist world. In context, therefore, one is

doubly surprised at Jameson’s absolute insistence upon difference and the relation of
otherness between the first world and the third, and his equally insistent idea that the

“experience” of the “third world” could be contained and communicated within a

single narrative form.

By locating capitalism in the first world and socialism in the second, Jameson’s
theory freezes and de-historicises the global space within which struggles between
these great motivating forces actually take place. And, by assimilating the enormous

heterogeneities and productivities of our life into a single Hegelian metaphor of the
master/slave relation, this theory reduces us to an ideal-type and demands from us
that we narrate ourselves through a form commensurate with that ideal-type. To say
that all third-world texts are necessarily this or that is to say, in effect, that any text

originating within that social space which is not this or that is not a “true” narrative.
It is in this sense above all, that the category of “third-world literature” which is the
site of this operation, with the “national allegory” as its metatext as well as the mark
of its constitution and difference, is, to my mind, epistemologically an impossible
category.

V

Part of the difficulty in engaging Jameson’s text is that there is a constant slip-
page, a recurrent inflation, in the way he handles the categories of his analysis. The

specificity of the first world, for example, seems at times to be predicated upon the

postmodernist moment, which is doubtless of recent origin, but at other times it

appears to be a matter of the capitalist mode of production, which is a much larger,
much older thing; and, in yet another range of formulations, this first world is said to
be coterminal with “western civilization” itself, obviously a rather primordial way of

being, dating back to antiquity (“Graeco-Judaic,” in Jameson’s phrase) and anterior
to any structuration of productions and classes as we know them today. When did
this first world become first, in the pre-Christian centuries, or after World War II?

11

Aijaz Ahmad

And, at what point in history does a text produced in countries with “experience
of colonialism and imperialism” become a third-world text? In one kind of reading,
only texts produced after the advent of colonialism could be so designated, since it is

colonialism/imperialism which constitutes the third world as such. But, in speaking
constantly of “the west’s other”; in referring to the tribal/tributary and the Asiatic
modes as the theoretical basis for his selection of Lu Xun (Asian) and Sembene

(African) respectively; in characterising Freud’s theory as a “western or first-world

reading” as contrasted with ten centuries of specifically Chinese distributions of the
libidinal energy which are said to frame Lu Xun’s texts-in deploying these broad

epochal and civilizational categories, Jameson suggests also that the difference be-
tween the first world and the third is itself primordial, rooted in things far older than

capitalism as such. If, then, the first world is the same as “the west” and the
“Graeco-Judaic,” one has an alarming feeling that the Bhagvad Geeta, the edicts of
Manu, and the Quran itself are perhaps third-world texts (though the Judaic elements
of the Quran are quite beyond doubt, and much of the ancient art in what is today
Pakistan is itself Graeco-Indic).

But there is also the question of space. Do all texts produced in countries with

“experience of colonialism and imperialism” become, by virtue of geographical ori-

gin, third-world texts? Jameson speaks so often of “all” third-world texts, insists so
much on a singular form of narrativity for third-world literature, that not to take him

literally is to violate the very terms of his discourse. Yet, one knows of so many texts
from one’s own part of the world which do not fit the description of “national

allegory” that one wonders why Jameson insists so much on the category “all.”
Without this category, of course, he cannot produce a theory of third-world litera-
ture. But is it also the case that he means the opposite of what he actually says: not
that “all third-world texts are to be read … as national allegories” but that only
those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of
third-world literature, while the rest are excluded by definition? Hence, one is not

quite sure whether one is dealing with a fallacy (“all third-world texts are” this or

that) or with the Law of the Father (you must write this if you are to be admitted into

my theory).
These shifts and hesitations in defining the objects of one’s knowledge are based,

I believe, on several confusions, one of which I shall specify here. For, if one argues
that the third world is constituted by the “experience of colonialism and im-

perialism,” one must also recognise the two-pronged action of the colonial/imperialist
dynamic: the forced transfers of value from the colonialised/imperialised formations,
and the intensification of capitalist relations within those formations. And if

capitalism is not merely an externality but also a shaping force within those forma-
tions, then one must conclude also that the separation between the public and the

private, so characteristic of capitalism, has occurred there as well, at least in some

12

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

degree and especially among the urban intelligentsia which produces most of the
written texts and which is itself caught in the world of capitalist commodities. With
this bifurcation must have come, at least for some of the producers of texts, the
individuation and personalisation of libidinal energies, the loss of access to “con-
crete” experience, and the consequent experience of self as isolated, alienated entity
incapable of real, organic connection with any collectivity. There must be texts,
perhaps numerous texts, that are grounded in this desolation, bereft of any capacity
for the kind of allegorisation and organicity that Jameson demands of them. The logic
of Jameson’s own argument (i.e., that the third world is constituted by “experience of
colonialism and imperialism”) leads necessarily to the conclusion that at least some of
the writers of the third world itself must be producing texts characteristic not of the
so-called tribal and Asiatic modes but of the capitalist era as such, much in the
manner of the so-called first world. But Jameson does not draw that conclusion.

He does not draw that conclusion at least partially because this so-called third
world is to him suspended outside the modern systems of production (capitalism and
socialism). He does not quite say that the third world is pre- or non-capitalist, but
that is clearly the implication of the contrast he establishes, as for example in the

following formulation:

… one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western
realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public,
between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the
domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of
the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus
Marx ….

I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis such
categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between them
are wholly different in third-world culture.

It is noteworthy that “the radical split between the private and the public” is

distinctly located in the capitalist mode here, but the absence of this split in so-called
third-world culture is not located in any mode of production-in keeping with

Jameson’s very definition of the Three Worlds. But Jameson knows what he is talking
about, and his statements have been less ambiguous in the past. Thus, we find the

following in his relatively early essay on Lukacs:

In the art works of a preindustrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw
material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning…. The story needs no

background in time because the culture knows no history; each generation repeats
the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the
first time …. The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete

13

14 Aijaz Ahmad

in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset … in the language of
Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation.

When we turn from such a work to the literature of the industrial era, every-
thing changes … a kind of dissolution of the human sets in…. For the unques-
tioned ritualistic time of village life no longer exists; there is henceforth a separation
between public and private … (Marxism And Form, pp. 165-67.)

Clearly, then, what was once theorised as a difference between the pre-industrial
and the industrialized societies (the unity of the public and the private in one, the

separation of the two in the other) is now transposed as a difference between the first
and third worlds. The idea of the “concrete” is now rendered in only slightly different

vocabulary: “third-world culture … must be situational and materialist despite
itself.” And it is perhaps that other idea-namely that “preindustrialized . . . culture
knows no history; each generation repeats the same experience”-which is at the
root of now suspending the so-called third world outside the modern modes of

production (capitalism and socialism), encapsulating the experience of this third
world in the Hegelian metaphor of the master/slave relation, and postulating a unit-

ary form of narrativity (the national allegory) in which the “experience” of this third
world is to be told. In both texts, the theoretical authority that is invoked is, predicta-
bly, that of Hegel.

Likewise, Jameson insists over and over again that the national experience is
central to the cognitive formation of the third-world intellectual and that the narrativ-

ity of that experience takes the form exclusively of a “national allegory,” but this

emphatic insistence on the category “nation” itself keeps slipping into a much wider,
far less demarcated vocabulary of “culture,” “society,” “collectivity” and so on. Are
“nation” and “collectivity” the same thing? Take, for example, the two statements
which seem to enclose the elaboration of the theory itself. In the beginning we are
told:

All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very
specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or
perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly
western machineries of representation, such as the novel.

But at the end we find the following:

… the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but
ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity
itself.

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

Are these two statements saying the same thing? The difficulty of this shift in

vocabulary is that one may indeed connect one’s personal experience to a

“collectivity”-in terms of class, gender, caste, religious community, trade union,
political party, village, prison-combining the private and the public, and in some
sense “allegorizing” the individual experience, without involving the category of “the
nation” or necessarily referring back to the “experience of colonialism and im-

perialism.” The latter statement would then seem to apply to a much larger body of

texts, with far greater accuracy. By the same token, however, this wider application of

“collectivity” establishes much less radical difference between the so-called first and
third worlds, since the whole history of realism in the European novel, in its many
variants, has been associated with ideas of “typicality” and “the social,” while the

majority of the written narratives produced in the first world even today locate the
individual story in a fundamental relation to some larger experience.

If we replace the idea of the nation with that larger, less restricting idea of

collectivity, and if we start thinking of the process of allegorisation not in nationalistic
terms but simply as a relation between private and public, personal and communal,
then it also becomes possible to see that allegorisation is by no means specific to the
so-called third world. While Jameson overstates the presence of “us,” the “national

allegory,” in the narratives of the third world, he also, in the same sweep, understates
the presence of analogous impulses in US cultural ensembles. For, what else are, let us

say, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Ellison’s The Invisible Man but allegorisations
of individual-and not so individual-experience? What else could Richard Wright
and Adrienne Rich and Richard Howard mean when they give to their books titles
like Native Son or Your Native Land, Your Life or Alone With America? It is not only
the Asian or the African but also the American writer whose private imaginations
must necessarily connect with experiences of the collectivity. One has only to look at
black and feminist writing to find countless allegories even within these postmoder-
nist United States.

VI

I also have some difficulty with Jameson’s description of “third-world literature”
as “non-canonical,” for I am not quite sure what that means. Since the vast majority
of literary texts produced in Asia, Africa and Latin America are simply not available
in English, their exclusion from the US/British “canon” is self-evident. If, however,
one considers the kind of texts Jameson seems to have in mind, one begins to wonder
just what mechanisms of canonisation there are from which this body of work is so

entirely excluded.
Neruda, Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Borges, Fuentes, Marquez et al. (i.e., quite a few

15

Aijaz Ahmad

writers of Latin American origin) are considered by the American academy as major
figures in modern literature. They, and even their translators, have received the most

prestigious awards (the Nobel for Marquez, for instance, or the National Book
Award for Eshleman’s translation of Vallejo) and they get taught quite as routinely in
literature courses as their German or Italian contemporaries might be, perhaps more

regularly in fact. Soyinka was recently canonised through the Nobel Prize and
Achebe’s novels are consistently more easily available in the US book market than are,
for example, Richard Wright’s. Edward Said, a man of Palestinian origin, has had

virtually every honor the US academy has to offer, with distinct constituencies of his
own; Orientalism, at least, gets taught widely, across several disciplines-more
widely, it seems, than the work of any other leftwing literary/cultural critic in this

country. V.S. Naipaul is now fully established as a major English novelist, and he does
come from the Caribbean; he is, like Borges, a “third-world writer.” Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was awarded the most prestigious literary award in

England and Shame was immediately reviewed as a major novel, almost always
favorably, in virtually all the major newspapers and literary journals in Britain and
the US. He is a major presence on the British cultural scene and a prized visitor to
conferences and graduate departments on both sides of the Atlantic. The blurbs on
the Vintage paperback edition of Shame-based partly on a quotation from the New
York Times-compare him with Swift, Voltaire, Stern, Kafka, Grass, Kundera and

Marquez. I am told that a PhD dissertation has been written about him at Columbia

already. What else is canonisation, when it comes to modern, contemporary, and in
some cases (Rushdie, for example) relatively young writers?

My argument is not that these reputations are not well-deserved (Naipaul is of
course a different matter), nor that there should not be more such canonisations. But
the representation of this body of work in Jameson’s discourse as simply “non-
canonical” (i.e., as something that has been altogether excluded from the contempo-
rary practices of high textuality in the US academy) does appear to over-state the case

considerably.
Jameson later speaks of “non-canonical forms of literature such as that of the

third world,” compares this singularized form to “another non-canonical form” in
which Dashiell Hammett is placed, and then goes on to say:

Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-
canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or
Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of
outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to
conclude that “they are still writing novels like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson.”

Now, I am not sure that realism, which appears to be at the heart of Jameson’s
characterization of “third-world literature” in this passage, is quite as universal in

16

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

that literature or quite as definitively superseded in what Jameson calls “first-world
cultural development.” Some of the most highly regarded US fictionists of the present
cultural moment, from Bellow and Malamud to Grace Paley and Robert Stone, seem
to write not quite “like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson” but surely within the realist
mode. On the other hand, Cesaire became so popular among the French surrealists
because the terms of his discourse were contemporaneous with their own, and Neruda
has been translated by some of the leading poets of the US because he is even formally
not “outmoded.” Novelists like Marquez or Rushdie have been so well received in the
US/British literary circles precisely because they do not write like Dreiser or Sher-
wood Anderson; the satisfactions of their outrageous texts are not those of Proust or

Joyce but are surely of an analogous kind, delightful to readers brought up on
modernism and postmodernism. Cesaire’s Return to the Native Land is what it is
because it combines what Jameson calls a “national allegory” with the formal
methods of the Parisian avant-garde of his student days. Borges is of course not seen
in the US any longer in terms of his Latin American origin; he now belongs to the

august company of the significant moderns, much like Kafka.
To say that the canon simply does not admit any third-world writers is to

misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works, i.e., through selective admission and
selective canonisation. Just as modernism has now been fully canonised in the
museum and the university, and as certain kinds of marxism have been incorporated
and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the “third world”
are also now part and parcel of the literary discourse in the US. Instead of claiming
straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire as to how the principle
of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropoli-
tan countries.

VII

I want to offer some comments on the history of Urdu literature, not in the form
of a cogent narrative, less still to formulate a short course in that history, but simply
to illustrate the kind of impoverishment that is involved in the a priori declaration
that “all third-world texts are necessarily … to be read as national allegories.”

It is, for example, a matter of some considerable curiosity to me that the Urdu

language, although one of the youngest linguistic formations in India, had neverthe-
less produced its first great poet, Khusrow, in the 13th century, so that a great
tradition of poetry got going, but then it waited roughly six centuries before begin-
ning to assemble the first sizeable body of prose narratives. Not that prose itself had
not been there; the earliest prose texts in Urdu date back to the 8th century, but those
were written for religious purposes and were often mere translations from Arabic or
Farsi. Non-seminarian and non-theological narratives-the ones that had to do with

17

Aijaz Ahmad

the pleasures of reading and the etiquettes of civility-began appearing much, much
later, in the last decade of the 18th century. Then, over two dozen of them got
published during the next ten years. What inhibited that development for so long, and

why did it happen precisely at that time? Much of that has to do with complex social

developments that had gradually led to the displacement of Farsi by Urdu as the

language of educated, urban speech and of prose writing in certain regions of North-
ern India.

That history we shall ignore, but a certain material condition of that production
can be specified: many, though by no means all, of those prose narratives of the 1810s

got written and published for the simple reason that a certain Scotsman, John Gil-

christ, had argued within his own circles that employees of the East India Company
could not hope to administer their Indian possessions on the basis of Persian alone,
and certainly not English, so that Fort William College was established in 1800 for the
education of the British in Indian languages, mainly in Urdu of which Gilchrist was a
scholar and exponent. He hired some of the most erudite men of his time and got
them to write whatever they wanted, so long as they wrote in accessible prose. It was
a stroke of genius, for what came out of that enterprise was the mobilisation of the
whole range of vocabularies existing at that time-the range of vocabularies were in

keeping with the pedagogical purpose-and the construction of narratives which
either transcribed the great classics of oral literature or condensed the fictions that

already existed in Arabic or Farsi and were therefore part of the cultural life of the
North Indian upper classes. Thus, the most famous of these narratives, Meer Am-
man’s Bagh-o-Bahar, was a condensation, in superbly colloquial Urdu, of the monu-
mental Qissa-e-Chahar Dervish, which Faizi, the great scholar, had composed some
centuries earlier in Farsi, for the amusement of Akbar, the Mughal king who was
almost an exact contemporary of the British Queen, Elizabeth.

But that was not the only impulse and the publishing house of Fort William

College was in any case closed within a decade. A similar development was occurring
in Lucknow, outside the British domains, at exactly the same time; some of the Fort
William writers had themselves come from Lucknow, looking for alternative

employment. Rajab Ali Beg Saroor’s Fasana-e-A’jaib is the great classic of this other
tradition of Urdu narrativity (these were actually not two different traditions but

parts of the same, some of which got formed in the British domains, some not). In

1848, eight years before it fell to British guns, the city of Lucknow had twelve printing
presses, and the consolidation of the narrative tradition in Urdu was inseparable from
the history of those presses. The remarkable thing about all the major Urdu prose
narratives which were written during the half century in which the British completed
their conquest of India is that there is nothing in their contents, in their way of seeing
the world, which can be reasonably connected with the colonial onslaught or with

any sense of resistance to it. By contrast, there is a large body of letters and even of

18

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

poetry which documents that colossal carnage. It is as if the establishment of printing
presses and the growth of a reading public for prose narratives gave rise to a kind of

writing whose only task was to preserve in books at least some of that Persianized
culture and those traditions of orality which were fast disappearing. It is only in this
negative sense that one could, by stretching the terms a great deal, declare this to be a
literature of the “national allegory.”

The man, Pandit Naval Kishore, who gave to the language its first great publish-
ing house, came somewhat later, however. His grandfather had been employed, like

many upper caste Hindus of the time, in the Mughal ministry of finance; his own
father was a businessman, genteel and affluent but not rich. Naval Kishore himself
had a passion for the written word; but like his father and grandfather, he also
understood money. He started his career as a journalist, then went on to purchasing
old hand-written manuscripts and publishing them for wider circulation. Over time,
he expanded into all sorts of fields, all connected with publishing, and gave to Urdu
its first great modern archive of published books. Urdu, in turn, showered him with

money; at the time of his death in 1895, his fortune was estimated at one crore rupees
(roughly a hundred million British pounds). He had to publish, I might add, more
than national allegories, more than what came out of the experience of colonialism
and imperialism, to make that kind of money.

But let me return to the issue of narration. It is a matter of some interest that the

emergence of what one could plausibly call a novel came more than half a century
after the appearance of those early registrations of the classics of the oral tradition
and the re-writing of Arabic and Farsi stories. Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad, the most

opulent of those early novels, was serialised during the 1870s in something else that
had begun emerging in the 1830s: regular Urdu newspapers for the emergent middle
classes. Between the traditional tale and the modern novel, then, there were other

things, such as newspapers and sizeable reading publics, much in the same way as one
encounters them in a whole range of books on English literary history, from Ian
Watt’s The Rise of the Novel to Lennard J. Davis’ more recent Factual Fictions. And I
have often wondered, as others have sometimes wondered about Dickens, if the
structure of Sarshar’s novel might not have been very different had it been written not
for serialisation but for direct publication as a book.

Those other books, independent of newspapers, came too. One very prolific
writer, whose name as it appears on the covers of his books is itself a curiosity, was
Shams-ul-Ulema Deputy Nazir Ahmed (1831-1912). The name was actually Nazir
Ahmed; “Shams-ul-Ulema” literally means a Sun among the scholars of Islam and
indicates his distinguished scholarship in that area; “Deputy” simply refers to the
fact that he had no independent income and had joined the Colonial Revenue Service.
His training in Arabic was rigorous and immaculate; his knowledge of English was

spotty, since he had had no formal training in it. He was a prolific translator, of

19

Aijaz Ahmad

everything: the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Law of Evidence, the Quran, books of

astronomy. He is known above all as a novelist, however, and he had one anxiety
above all others: that girls should get modern education (in which he represented the

emergent urban bourgeoisie) and that they nevertheless remain good, traditional
housewives (a sentiment that was quite widespread, across all social boundaries). It
was this anxiety that governed most of his fictions.

It is possible to argue, I think, that the formative phase of the Urdu novel and the
narratives that arose alongside that novel, in the latter part of the 19th century and
the first decades of the 20th, had to do much less with the experience of colonialism
and imperialism as such and much more with two other kinds of pressures and
themes: (a) the emergence of a new kind of petty bourgeois who was violating all
established social norms for his own pecuniary ends (Nazir Ahmed’s own Ibn-ul-

Vaqt-“Time-Server,” in rough English approximation-is a classic of that genre);
and (b) the status of women. Nazir Ahmed of course took conservative positions on
both these themes and was prolific on the latter. But there were others as well.

Rashid-ul-Khairi, for example, established a very successful publishing house, the
Asmat Book Depot, which published hundreds of books for women and children, as
well as the five journals that came into my family over two generations: Asmat,
Khatoon-e-Mashriq, Jauhar-e-Nisvan, Banat, and Nau-Nehal. English approxima-
tions for the latter four titles are easier to provide: “Woman of the East,” “Essence of

Womanhood,” “Girls” (or “Daughters”), and “Children.” But the first of these titles,
Asmat, is harder to render in English, for the Urdu usage of this word has many
connotations, from virginity to honor to propriety, in a verbal condensation which

expresses inter-related preoccupations. That these journals came regularly into my
family for roughly forty years is itself significant, for mine was not, in metropolitan
terms, an educated family; we lived in a small village, far from the big urban centers,
and I was the first member of this family to finish high school or drive an automobile.
That two generations of women and children in such a family would be part of the

regular readership of such journals shows the social reach of this kind of publishing.
Much literature, in short, revolved around the issues of femininity and propriety, in a

very conservative sort of way.
But then there were other writers as well, such as Meer Hadi Hassan Rusva who

challenged the dominant discourse and wrote his famous Umrao Jan Ada about those
women for whom Urdu has many words, the most colorful of which can be rendered
as “women of the upper chamber”: women to whom men of property in certain
social milieux used to go for instruction in erotic play, genteel manner, literary taste,
and knowledge of music. The scandal of Rusva’s early 20th-century text is its propos-
ition that since such a woman depends upon no one man, and because many men

depend on her, she is the only relatively free woman in our society. He obviously did
not like Nazir Ahmed’s work, but I must also emphasize that the ironic and incipient

20

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

“feminism” of this text is not a reflection of any westernisation. Rusva was a very
traditional man and was simply tired of certain kinds of moral posturing. Meanwhile,
the idea that familial repressions in our traditional society were so great that the only
women who had any sort of freedom to make fundamental choices for themselves
were the ones who had no “proper” place in that society-that subversive idea was to

re-appear in all kinds of ways when the next major break came in the forms of Urdu

narrativity, in the 1930s, under the banner not of nationalism but of the Progressive
Writers Union which was a cultural front of the Communist Party of India and had
come into being directly as a result of the united front policy of the comintern after
1935.

Critical realism became the fundamental form of narrativity thereafter, for

roughly two decades. “Nation” was certainly a category used in this narrative,
especially in the non-fictional narrative, and there was an explicit sense of sociality
and collectivity, but the categories that one deployed for that sense of collectivity were

complex and several, for what critical realism demanded was that a critique of others

(anti-colonialism) be conducted in the perspective of an even more comprehensive,
multi-faceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our

management of bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences. I cannot think of a

single novel in Urdu between 1935 and 1947, the crucial year leading up to de-

colonisation, which is in any direct or exclusive way about “the experience of colo-
nialism and imperialism.” All the novels that I know from that period are predomi-
nantly about other things: the barbarity of feudal landowners, the rapes and murders
in the houses of religious “mystics,” the stranglehold of moneylenders upon the lives
of peasants and the lower petty bourgeoisie, the social and sexual frustrations of

school-going girls, and so on. The theme of anti-colonialism is woven into many of
those novels but never in an exclusive or even dominant emphasis. In fact, I do not
know of any fictional narrative in Urdu, in the last roughly two hundred years, which
is of any significance and any length (I am making an exception for a few short stories

here) and in which the issue of colonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational en-
counter between the English and the Indian has the same primacy as, for example, in
Forster’s A Passage To India or Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. The typical Urdu writer
has had a peculiar vision, in which he/she has never been able to construct fixed
boundaries between the criminalities of the colonialist and the brutalities of all those

indigenous people who have had power in our own society. We have had our own

hysterias here and there, far too many in fact, but there has never been a sustained,
powerful myth of a primal innocence, when it comes to the colonial encounter.

The “nation” indeed became the primary ideological problematic in Urdu litera-
ture at the moment of independence, for our independence too was peculiar: it came

together with the partition of our country, the biggest and possibly the most miserable

migration in human history, the biggest bloodbath in the memory of the sub-

21

Aijaz Ahmad

continent: the gigantic fratricide conducted by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh com-
munalists. Our “nationalism” at this juncture was a nationalism of mourning, a form
of valediction, for what we witnessed was not just the British policy of divide and
rule, which surely was there, but our own willingness to break up our civilizational

unity, to kill our neighbors, to forego that civic ethos, that moral bond with each
other, without which human community is impossible. A critique of others (anti-
colonial nationalism) receded even further into the background, entirely overtaken
now by an even harsher critique of ourselves. The major fictions of the 50s and
60s-the. shorter fictions of Manto, Bedi, Intezar Hussein; the novels of Qurrat ul
Ain, Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Hussein-came out of that refusal to forgive what
we ourselves had done and were still doing, in one way or another, to our own polity.
There was no quarter given to the colonialist; but there was none for ourselves either.
One could speak, in a general sort of way, of “the nation” in this context, but not of
“nationalism.” In Pakistan, of course, there was another, overriding doubt: were we a
nation at all? Most of the leftwing, I am sure, said No.

VIII

Finally, I also have some difficulty with the way Jameson seems to understand the

epistemological status of the dialectic. For, what seems to lie at the heart of all the
analytic procedures in his text is a search for, the notion that there is, a unitary
determination which can be identified, in its splendid isolation, as the source of all

narrativity: the proposition that the “third world” is a singular formation, possessing
its own unique, unitary force of determination in the sphere of ideology (nationalism)
and cultural production (the national allegory).

Within a postmodernist intellectual milieu where texts are to be read as the

utterly free, altogether hedonistic plays of the signifier, I can well empathise with a
theoretical operation that seeks to locate the production of texts within a determi-
nate, knowable field of power and signification. But the idea of a unitary determina-
tion is in its origins a pre-marxist idea. I hasten to add that this idea is surely present
in a number of Marx’s own formulations as well as in a number of very honorable,
highly productive theoretical formations that have followed, in one way or another, in
Marx’s footsteps. It is to be seen in action, for example, even in so recent a debate as
the one that followed the famous Dobb-Sweezy exchange and which came to be
focused on the search for a “prime mover” (the issue of a unitary determination in the
rise of the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe). So, when Jameson
implicitly invokes this particular understanding of the dialectic, he is in distinguished
company indeed.

But there is, I believe, a considerable space where one could take one’s stand
between (a) the postmodernist cult of utter non-determinacy and (b) the idea of a

22

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

unitary determination which has lasted from Hegel up to some of the most modern of
the marxist debates. For, the main thrust of the marxist dialectic, as I understand it, is

comprised of a tension (a mutually transformative relation) between the problematic
of a final determination (of the ideational content by the life-process of material

labor, for example) and the utter historicity of multiple, interpenetrating determina-
tions, so that, in Engels’ words, the “outcome” of any particular history hardly ever

corresponds to the “will” of any of those historical agents who struggle over that
outcome. Thus, for example, I have said that what constitutes the unity of the world
is the global operation of the capitalist mode of production and the resistance to that
mode which is ultimately socialist in character. But this constitutive fact does not

operate in the same way in all the countries of Asia and Africa. In Namibia, the

imposition of the capitalist mode takes a directly colonial form, whereas the central
fact in India is the existence of stable and widespread classes of capitalist society
within a post-colonial bourgeois polity; in Vietnam, which has already entered a

post-capitalist phase, albeit in a context of extreme devastation of the productive
forces, the character of this constitutive dialectic is again entirely different. So, while
the problematic of a “final determination” is surely active in each case it is consti-
tuted differently in different cases, and literary production must, on the whole, reflect
that difference.

What further complicates this dialectic of the social and the literary is that most

literary productions, whether of the “first world” or of the “third,” are not always
available for that kind of direct and unitary determination by any one factor, no
matter how central that factor is in constituting the social formation as a whole.

Literary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually very over-determined
contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of

any complexity shall always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its

energy and form, before it is totalised into a universal category. This fact of over-
determination does not mean that individual texts merely float in the air, or that

“totality” as such is an impossible cognitive category. But in any comprehension of

totality, one would always have to specify and historicize the determinations which
constitute any given field; with sufficient knowledge of the field, it is normally possi-
ble to specify the principal ideological formations and narrative forms. What is not

possible is to operate with the few texts that become available in the metropolitan
languages and then to posit a complete singularization and transparency in the

process of determinacy, so that all ideological complexity is reduced to a single
ideological formation and all narratives are read as local expressions of a metatext. If
one does that, one shall produce not the knowledge of a totality, which I too take to
be a fundamental cognitive category, but an idealization, either of the Hegelian or of
the positivist kind.

What I mean by multiple determinations at work in any text of considerable

23

Aijaz Ahmad

complexity can be specified, I believe, by looking briefly at the problem of the cultural
location of Jameson’s own text. This is, ostensibly, a first-world text; Jameson is a US
intellectual and identifies himself as such. But he is a US intellectual of a certain kind;
not everyone is able to juxtapose Ousmane and Deleuze so comfortably, so well; and
he debunks the “global American culture of postmodernism” which he says is the
culture of his country. His theoretical framework, moreover, is marxist, his political
identification socialist-which would seem to place’this text in the second world. But
the particular energy of his text-its thematics, its relation with those other texts
which give it its meaning, the very narrative upon which his “theory of cognitive
aesthetics” rests-takes him deep into the third world, valorizing it, asserting it,
filiating himself with it, as against the politically dominant and determinant of his
own country. Where do I, who do not believe in the Three Worlds Theory, in which
world should I place his text: the first world of his origin, the second world of his

ideology and politics, or the third world of his filiation and sympathy? And, if “all
third-world texts are necessarily” this or that, how is it that his own text escapes an
exclusive location in the first world? I-being who I am-shall place it primarily in
the global culture of socialism (Jameson’s second world-my name for a global
resistance) and I shall do so not by suppressing the rest (his US origins, his third
world sympathies) but by identifying that which has been central to all his theoretical

undertakings for many years.
These obviously are not the only determinations at work in Jameson’s text. I

shall mention only two others, both of which are indicated by his silences. His is,
among other things, a gendered text. For, it is inconceivable to me that this text could
have been written by a US woman without some considerable statement, probably a

full-length discussion, of the fact that the bifurcation of the public and the private,
and the necessity to re-constitute that relation where it has been broken, which is so
central to Jameson’s discussion of the opposition between first-world and third-world
cultural practices, is indeed a major preoccupation of first-world women writers

today, on both sides of the Atlantic. And, Jameson’s text is determined also by a
certain racial milieu. For, it is equally inconceivable to me that this text could have
been written by a black writer in the US who would not also insist that black
literature of this country possesses this unique third-world characteristic that it is

replete with national allegories (more replete, I personally believe, than is Urdu

literature).
I point out the above for three reasons. One is to strengthen my proposition that

the ideological conditions of a text’s production are never singular but always several.

Second, even if I were to accept Jameson’s division of the globe into three worlds, I
would still have to insist, as my references not only to feminism and black literature
but to Jameson’s own location would indicate, that there is right here, within the belly
of the first world’s global postmodernism, a veritable third world, perhaps two or

24

Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” 25

three of them. Third, I want to insist that within the unity that has been bestowed

upon our globe by the irreconcilable struggle of capital and labour, there are increas-

ingly those texts which cannot be easily placed within this or that world. Jameson’s is
not a first-world text, mine is not a third-world text. We are not each other’s civiliza-
tional Others.

• Article Contents

p. 3
p. 4
p. 5
p. 6
p. 7
p. 8
p. 9
p. 10
p. 11
p. 12
p. 13
p. 14
p. 15
p. 16
p. 17
p. 18
p. 19
p. 20
p. 21
p. 22
p. 23
p. 24
p. 25

• Issue Table of Contents

Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 1-142
Front Matter [pp. 1 – 96]
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” [pp. 3 – 25]
A Brief Response [pp. 26 – 27]
Regarding Postmodernism. A Conversation with Fredric Jameson [pp. 29 – 54]
Plot Devices in the Occupation [pp. 55 – 66]
Faust’s Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoff into Transcendence [pp. 67 – 95]
A Review Play on Paul Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War [pp. 97 – 105]
Simone de Beauvoir. Mother of Us All [pp. 107 – 109]
Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom [pp. 111 – 122]
Simone de Beauvoir and the Existential Basis of Socialism [pp. 123 – 133]
Selections from Towards a Morals of Ambiguity, according to Pyrrhus and Cinéas [pp. 135 – 142]
Back Matter

The Translation Studies Reader

Edited by

Lawrence Venuti

Advisory Editor: Mona Baker

London and New York

First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simulataneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

© 2000 This collection and editorial matter © Lawrence Venuti;
individual essays © individual contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Translation studies reader/edited by Lawrence Venuti.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting. I. Venuti, Lawrence.

P306.T7436 2000
418′.02–dc21 99–36161

CIP

ISBN 0-203-44662-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-75486-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-18746-X (Hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18747-8 (Pbk)

Chapter 8

Roman Jakobson

ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF

TRANSLATION

AC C O R D I N G T O B E RT R A N D R U S S E L L , “no one can understandthe word ‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.”1 If,
however, we follow Russell’s fundamental precept and place our “emphasis upon
the linguistic aspects of traditional philosophical problems,” then we are obliged to
state that no one can understand the word “cheese” unless he has an acquaintance
with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code of English. Any
representative of a cheese-less culinary culture will understand the English word
“cheese” if he is aware that in this language it means “food made of pressed curds”
and if he has at least a linguistic acquaintance with “curds.” We never consumed
ambrosia or nectar and have only a linguistic acquaintance with the words
“ambrosia,” “nectar,” and “gods”—the name of their mythical users; nonetheless,
we understand these words and know in what contexts each of them may be used.

The meaning of the words “cheese,” “apple,” “nectar,” “acquaintance,” “but,”
“mere,” and of any word or phrase whatsoever is definitely a linguistic—or to be
more precise and less narrow—a semiotic fact. Against those who assign meaning
(signatum) not to the sign, but to the thing itself, the simplest and truest argument
would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted the meaning of “cheese” or of
“apple.” There is no signatum without signum. The meaning of the word “cheese”
cannot be inferred from a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheddar or with
camembert without the assistance of the verbal code. An array of linguistic signs is
needed to introduce an unfamiliar word. Mere pointing will not teach us whether
“cheese” is the name of the given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of
camembert in general or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any
refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents. Finally, does a word

1959

114 ROMAN JAKOBSON

simply name the thing in question, or does it imply a meaning such as offering,
sale, prohibition, or malediction? (Pointing actually may mean malediction; in
some cultures, particularly in Africa, it is an ominous gesture.)

For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word-users, the meaning of any
linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign, especially a
sign “in which it is more fully developed,” as Peirce, the deepest inquirer into the
essence of signs, insistently stated.2 The term “bachelor” may be converted into a
more explicit designation, “unmarried man,” whenever higher explicitness is
required. We distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be
translated into other signs of the same language, into another language, or into
another, nonverbal system of symbols. These three kinds of translation are to be
differently labeled:

1 Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by

means of other signs of the same language.
2 Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal

signs by means of some other language.
3 Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs

by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.

The intralingual translation of a word uses either another, more or less
synonymous, word or resorts to a circumlocution. Yet synonymy, as a rule, is not
complete equivalence: for example, “every celibate is a bachelor, but not every
bachelor is a celibate.” A word or an idiomatic phrase-word, briefly a code-unit
of the highest level, may be fully interpreted only by means of an equivalent
combination of code-units, i.e., a message referring to this code-unit: “every
bachelor is an unmarried man, and every unmarried man is a bachelor,” or
“every celibate is bound not to marry, and everyone who is bound not to marry
is a celibate.”

Likewise, on the level of interlingual translation, there is ordinarily no full
equivalence between code-units, while messages may serve as adequate
interpretations of alien code-units or messages. The English word “cheese” cannot
be completely identified with its standard Russian heteronym “ ,” because cottage
cheese is a cheese but not a . Russians say: “bring
cheese and [sic] cottage cheese.” In standard Russian, the food made of pressed
curds is called only if ferment is used.

Most frequently, however, translation from one language into another substitutes
messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in
some other language. Such a translation is a reported speech; the translator recodes
and transmits a message received from another source. Thus translation involves
two equivalent messages in two different codes.

Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal
concern of linguistics. Like any receiver of verbal messages, the linguist acts as
their interpreter. No linguistic specimen may be interpreted by the science of
language without a translation of its signs into other signs of the same system or
into signs of another system. Any comparison of two languages implies an
examination of their mutual translatability; widespread practice of interlingual

ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 115

communication, particularly translating activities, must be kept under constant
scrutiny by linguistic science. It is difficult to overestimate the urgent need for and
the theoretical and practical significance of differential bilingual dictionaries with
careful comparative definition of all the corresponding units in their intention and
extension. Likewise differential bilingual grammars should define what unifies and
what differentiates the two languages in their selection and delimitation of
grammatical concepts.

Both the practice and the theory of translation abound with intricacies, and
from time to time attempts are made to sever the Gordian knot by proclaiming
the dogma of untranslatability. “Mr. Everyman, the natural logician,” vividly
imagined by B.L.Whorf, is supposed to have arrived at the following bit of
reasoning: “Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides
for unlike formulation of them.”3 In the first years of the Russian revolution there
were fanatic visionaries who argued in Soviet periodicals for a radical revision
of traditional language and particularly for the weeding out of such misleading
expressions as “sunrise” or “sunset.” Yet we still use this Ptolemaic imagery
without implying a rejection of Copernican doctrine, and we can easily transform
our customary talk about the rising and setting sun into a picture of the earth’s
rotation simply because any sign is translatable into a sign in which it appears to
us more fully developed and precise.

A faculty of speaking a given language implies a faculty of talking about this
language. Such a “metalinguistic” operation permits revision and redefinition of
the vocabulary used. The complementarity of both levels—object-language and
metalanguage—was brought out by Niels Bohr: all well-defined experimental
evidence must be expressed in ordinary language, “in which the practical use of
every word stands in complementary relation to attempts of its strict definition.”4

All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing
language. Whenever there is deficiency, terminology may be qualified and amplified
by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by
circumlocutions. Thus in the newborn literary language of the Northeast Siberian
Chukchees, “screw” is rendered as “rotating nail,” “steel” as “hard iron,” “tin” as
“thin iron,” “chalk” as “writing soap,” “watch” as “hammering heart.” Even
seemingly contradictory circumlocutions, like “electrical horse-car”
( ), the first Russian name of the horseless street car, or “flying
steamship” (jena paragot), the Koryak term for the airplane, simply designate the
electrical analogue of the horse-car and the flying analogue of the steamer and do
not impede communication, just as there is no semantic “noise” and disturbance in
the double oxymoron—“cold beef-and-pork hot dog.”

No lack of grammatical device in the language translated into makes impossible
a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original.
The traditional conjunctions “and,” “or” are now supplemented by a new
connective—“and/or”—which was discussed a few years ago in the witty book
Federal Prose—How to Write in and/or for Washington.5 Of these three
conjunctions, only the latter occurs in one of the Samoyed languages.6 Despite
these differences in the inventory of conjunctions, all three varieties of messages
observed in “federal prose” may be distinctly translated both into traditional English
and into this Samoyed language. Federal prose: 1) John and Peter, 2) John or Peter,

116 ROMAN JAKOBSON

3) John and/or Peter will come. Traditional English: 3) John and Peter or one of
them will come. Samoyed: John and/or Peter both will come, 2) John and/or Peter,
one of them will come.

If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be
translated into this language by lexical means. Dual forms like Old Russian ?para
are translated with the help of the numeral: “two brothers.” It is more difficult to
remain faithful to the original when we translate into a language provided with a
certain grammatical category from a language devoid of such a category. When
translating the English sentence “She has brothers” into a language which
discriminates dual and plural, we are compelled either to make our own choice
between two statements “She has two brothers”—“She has more than two” or to
leave the decision to the listener and say: “She has either two or more than two
brothers.” Again in translating from a language without grammatical number into
English one is obliged to select one of the two possibilities—“brother” or “brothers”
or to confront the receiver of this message with a two-choice situation: “She has
either one or more than one brother.”

As Boas neatly observed, the grammatical pattern of a language (as opposed
to its lexical stock) determines those aspects of each experience that must be
expressed in the given language: “We have to choose between these aspects, and
one or the other must be chosen.”7 In order to translate accurately the English
sentence “I hired a worker,” a Russian needs supplementary information, whether
this action was completed or not and whether the worker was a man or a woman,
because he must make his choice between a verb of completive or noncompletive
aspect— or —and between a masculine and feminine noun—

or . If I ask the utterer of the English sentence whether the
worker was male or female, my question may be judged irrelevant or indiscreet,
whereas in the Russian version of this sentence an answer to this question is
obligatory. On the other hand, whatever the choice of Russian grammatical forms
to translate the quoted English message, the translation will give no answer to
the question of whether I “hired” or “have hired” the worker, or whether he/she
was an indefinite or definite worker (“a” or “the”). Because the information
required by the English and Russian grammatical pattern is unlike, we face quite
different sets of two-choice situations; therefore a chain of translations of one and
the same isolated sentence from English into Russian and vice versa could entirely
deprive such a message of its initial content. The Geneva linguist S.Karcevski
used to compare such a gradual loss with a circular series of unfavorable currency
transactions. But evidently the richer the context of a message, the smaller the
loss of information.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may
convey. Each verb of a given language imperatively raises a set of specific yes-or-
no questions, as for instance: is the narrated event conceived with or without
reference to its completion? Is the narrated event presented as prior to the speech
event or not? Naturally the attention of native speakers and listeners will be
constantly focused on such items as are compulsory in their verbal code.

In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on the grammatical
pattern because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation
to metalinguistic operations—the cognitive level of language not only admits but

ON LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION 117

directly requires receding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any assumption of
ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms. But in
jest, in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call everyday verbal mythology
and in poetry above all, the grammatical categories carry a high semantic import.
In these conditions, the question of translation becomes much more entangled and
controversial.

Even such a category as grammatical gender, often cited as merely formal,
plays a great role in the mythological attitudes of a speech community. In Russian
the feminine cannot designate a male person, nor the masculine specify a female.
Ways of personifying or metaphorically interpreting inanimate nouns are prompted
by their gender. A test in the Moscow Psychological Institute (1915) showed that
Russians, prone to personify the weekdays, consistently represented Monday,
Tuesday, and Thursday as males and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as females,
without realizing that this distribution was due to the masculine gender of the
first three names ( ) as against the feminine gender
of the others ( ). The fact that the word for Friday is
masculine in some Slavic languages and feminine in others is reflected in the folk
traditions of the corresponding peoples, which differ in their Friday ritual. The
widespread Russian superstition that a fallen knife presages a male guest and a
fallen fork a female one is determined by the masculine gender of “knife”
and the feminine of “fork” in Russian. In Slavic and other languages where
“day” is masculine and “night” feminine, day is represented by poets as the
lover of night. The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been
depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that “sin” is feminine
in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (Γpex). Likewise a Russian
child, while reading a translation of German tales, was astounded to find that
Death, obviously a woman (Russian , fem.), was pictured as an old man
(German der Tod, masc.). My Sister Life, the title of a book of poems by Boris
Pasternak, is quite natural in Russian, where “life” is feminine , but was
enough to reduce to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his attempt to translate
these poems, since in Czech this noun is masculine z∨∨∨∨∨ivot.

What was the initial question which arose in Slavic literature at its very
beginning? Curiously enough, the translator’s difficulty in preserving the symbolism
of genders, and the cognitive irrelevance of this difficulty, appears to be the main
topic of the earliest Slavic original work, the preface to the first translation of the
Evangeliarium, made in the early 860’s by the founder of Slavic letters and liturgy,
Constantine the Philosopher, and recently restored and interpreted by A.Vaillant.8

“Greek, when translated into another language, cannot always be reproduced
identically, and that happens to each language being translated,” the Slavic apostle
states. “Masculine nouns as ‘river’ and ‘star’ in Greek, are feminine
in another language as and in Slavic.” According to Vaillant’s
commentary, this divergence effaces the symbolic identification of the rivers with
demons and of the stars with angels in the Slavic translation of two of Matthew’s
verses (7:25 and 2:9). But to this poetic obstacle, Saint Constantine resolutely
opposes the precept of Dionysius the Areopagite, who called for chief attention to
the cognitive values ( ) and not to the words themselves.

In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of the text. Syntactic

118 ROMAN JAKOBSON

and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components
(distinctive features)—in short, any constituents of the verbal code—are confronted,
juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the principle of similarity
and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification. Phonemic similarity is
sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps
more precise term—paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is
absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative
transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from one poetic shape
into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language into another, or
finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs into another, e.g.,
from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.

If we were to translate into English the traditional formula Traduttore, traditore
as “the translator is a betrayer,” we would deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of
all its paronomastic value. Hence a cognitive attitude would compel us to change
this aphorism into a more explicit statement and to answer the questions: translator
of what messages? betrayer of what values?

Notes

1 Bertrand Russell, “Logical Positivism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie,
IV (1950), 18; cf. p. 3.

2 Cf. John Dewey, “Peirce’s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and Meaning,”
The Journal of Philosophy, XLIII (1946), 91.

3 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), p. 235.

4 Niels Bohr, “On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity,” Dialectica,
I (1948), 317f.

5 James R.Masterson and Wendell Brooks Phillips, Federal Prose (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1948), p. 40f.

6 Cf. Knut Bergsland, “Finsk-ugrisk og almen språkvitenskap,” Norsk Tidsskrift
for Sprogvidenskap, XV (1949), 374f.

7 Franz Boas, “Language,” General Anthropology (Boston, 1938), pp. 132f.
8 André Vaillant, “Le Préface de l’Évangeliaire vieux-slave,” Revue des Études

Slaves, XXIV (1948), 5f.

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65-88
Published by: Duke University Press
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Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism

FREDRIC JAMESON

Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is
now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country
that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to “us” and what
we have to do and how we do it, to what we can’t do and what we do better than
this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to the level of the

“people.” This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing
“America,” and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is nothing but that
old thing called “nationalism,” long since liquidated here and rightly so. Yet a
certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world (and also in the most vital
areas of the second world), thus making it legitimate to ask whether it is all that
bad in the end.’ Does in fact the message of some disabused and more experienced
first-world wisdom (that of Europe even more than of the United States) consist in

urging these nation states to outgrow it as fast as possible? The predictble remin-
ders of Kampuchea and of Iraq and Iran do not really seem to me to settle

anything or suggest by what these nationalisms might be replaced except perhaps
some global American postmodernist culture.

Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of non-
canonical forms of literature such as that of the third world,2 but one is peculiarly
self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary: the strategy of

trying to prove that these texts are as “great” as those of the canon itself. The

object is then to show that, to take an example from another non-canonical form,
Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoyevsky, and therefore can be admitted.
This is to attempt dutifully to wish away all traces of that “pulp” format which is
constitutive of sub-genres, and it invites immediate failure insofar as any passion-
ate reader of Dostoyevsky will know at once, after a few pages, that those kinds of
satisfactions are not present. Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the
radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the
satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its

tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural de-

velopment and to cause us to conclude that “they are still writing novels like
Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.”

A case could be built on this kind of discouragement, with its deep existential
commitment to a rhythm of modernist innovation if not fashion-changes; but it

65

Fredric Jameson

would not be a moralizing one-a historicist one, rather, which challenges our

imprisonment in the present of postmodernism and calls for a reinvention of the
radical difference of our own cultural past and its now seemingly old-fashioned
situations and novelties.

But I would rather argue all this a different way, at least for now3: these
reactions to third-world texts are at one and the same time perfectly natural,
perfectly comprehensible, and terribly parochial. If the purpose of the canon is to
restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions
which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts, to

discourage us from reading anything else or from reading those things in different

ways, then it is humanly impoverishing. Indeed our want of sympathy for these
often unmodern third-world texts is itself frequently but a disguise for some

deeper fear of the affluent about the way people actually live in other parts of the
world-a way of life that still has little in common with daily life in the American
suburb. There is nothing particularly disgraceful in having lived a sheltered life, in
never having had to confront the difficulties, the complications and the frustra-
tions of urban living, but it is nothing to be particularly proud of either. Moreover,
a limited experience of life normally does not make for a wide range of sympathies
with very different kinds of people (I’m thinking of differences that range from

gender and race all the way to those of social class and culture).
The way in which all this affects the reading process seems to be as follows: as

western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own

modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before

us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and
this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a

narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information
and a social interest that we cannot share. The fear and the resistance I’m evoking
has to do, then, with the sense of our own non-coincidence with that Other reader,
so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in any adequate way with
that Other “ideal reader”-that is to say, to read this text adequately-we would
have to give up a great deal that is individually precious to us and acknowledge an
existence and a situation unfamiliar and therefore frightening-one that we do
not know and prefer not to know.

Why, returning to the question of the canon, should we only read certain
kinds of books? No one is suggesting we should not read those, but why should we
not also read other ones? We are not, after all, being shipped to that “desert
island” beloved of the devisers of great books lists. And as a matter of fact-and
this is to me the conclusive nail in the argument-we all do “read” many different
kinds of texts in this life of ours, since, whether we are willing to admit it or not,
we spend much of our existence in the force field of a mass culture that is radically

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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

different from our “great books” and live at least a double life in the various

compartments of our unavoidably fragmented society. We need to be aware that
we are even more fundamentally fragmented than that; rather than clinging to this

particular mirage of the “centered subject” and the unified personal identity, we
would do better to confront honestly the fact of fragmentation on a global scale; it
is a confrontation with which we can here at least make a cultural beginning.

A final observation on my use of the term “third world.” I take the point of
criticisms of this expression, particularly those which stress the way in which it
obliterates profound differences between a whole range of non-western countries
and situations (indeed, one such fundamental opposition-between the traditions
of the great eastern empires and those of the post-colonial African nation states-
is central in what follows). I don’t, however, see any comparable expression that
articulates, as this one does, the fundamental breaks between the capitalist first
world, the socialist bloc of the second world, and a range of other countries which
have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism. One can only deplore
the ideological implications of oppositions such as that between “developed” and

“underdeveloped” or “developing” countries; while the more recent conception of
northern and southern tiers, which has a very different ideological content and

import than the rhetoric of development, and is used by very different people,
nonetheless implies an unquestioning acceptance of “convergence theory”-
namely the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States are from this perspec-
tive largely the same thing. I am using the term “third world” in an essentially
descriptive sense, and objections to it do not strike me as especially relevant to the

argument I am making.

In these last years of the century, the old question of a properly world litera-
ture reasserts itself. This is due as much or more to the disintegration of our own

conceptions of cultural study as to any very lucid awareness of the great outside
world around us. We may therefore-as “humanists”-acknowledge the perti-
nence of the critique of present-day humanities by our titular leader, William

Bennett, without finding any great satisfaction in his embarrassing solution: yet
another impoverished and ethnocentric Graeco-Judaic “great books list’ of the
civilization of the West,” “great texts, great minds, great ideas.”4 One is tempted
to turn back on Bennett himself the question he approvingly quotes from Maynard
Mack: “How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minor-

ity so transfixed by its own image?” Nevertheless, the present moment does offer a
remarkable opportunity to rethink our humanities curriculum in a new way-to
re-examine the shambles and ruins of all our older “great books,” “humanities,”
“freshman-introductory” and “core course” type traditions.

67

Fredric Jameson

Today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States demands the
reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as “world
literature.” In our more immediate context, then, any conception of world litera-
ture necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-
world literature, and it is this not necessarily narrower subject about which I have

something to say today.
It would be presumptuous to offer some general theory of what is often called

third-world literature, given the enormous variety both of national cultures in the
third world and of specific historical trajectories in each of those areas. All of this,
then, is provisional and intended both to suggest specific perspectives for research
and to convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly neglected literatures
for people formed by the values and stereotypes of a first-world culture. One

important distinction would seem to impose itself at the outset, namely that none
of these cultures can be conceived as anthropologically independent or autonom-
ous, rather, they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle
with first-world cultural imperialism-a cultural struggle that is itself a reflexion
of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of

capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of modernization. This, then,
is some first sense in which a study of third-world culture necessarily entails a new
view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are (perhaps without

fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work on the remains of older
cultures in our general world capitalist system.

But if this is the case, the initial distinction that imposes itself has to do with
the nature and development of older cultures at the moment of capitalist penetra-
tion, something it seems to me most enlightening to examine in terms of the
marxian concept of modes of production.5 Contemporary historians seem to be in
the process of reaching a consensus on the specificity of feudalism as a form

which, issuing from the break-up of the Roman Empire or the Japanese Shogu-
nate, is able to develop directly into capitalism.6 This is not the case with the other
modes of production, which in some sense must be disaggregated or destroyed by
violence, before capitalism is able to implant its specific forms and displace the
older ones. In the gradual expansion of capitalism across the globe, then, our
economic system confronts two very distinct modes of production that pose two

very different types of social and cultural resistance to its influence. These are
so-called primitive, or tribal society on the one hand, and the Asiatic mode of

production, or the great bureaucratic imperial systems, on the other. African
societies and cultures, as they became the object of systematic colonization in the

1880s, provide the most striking examples of the symbiosis of capital and tribal

societies; while China and India offer the principal examples of another and quite
different sort of engagement of capitalism with the great empires of the so-called

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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

Asiatic mode. My examples below, then, will be primarily African and Chinese;
however, the special case of Latin America must be noted in passing. Latin
America offers yet a third kind of development-one involving an even earlier
destruction of imperial systems now projected by collective memory back into the
archaic or tribal. Thus the earlier nominal conquests of independence open them at
once to a kind of indirect economic penetration and control-something Africa
and Asia will come to experience only more recently with decolonization in the
1950s and 60s.

Having made these initial distinctions, let me now, by way of a sweeping
hypothesis, try to say what all third-world cultural productions seem to have in
common and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in
the first world. All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical,
and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories,
even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of

predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me

try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants
of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel,
is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the

political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and
the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of
secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx. Our numerous
theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm its existence and its

shaping power over our individual and collective lives. We have been traiAed in a

deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private existences is
somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science and politi-
cal dynamics. Politics in our novels therefore is, according to Stendhal’s canonical
formulation, a “pistol shot in the middle of a concert.”

I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis
such categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between
them are wholly different in third-world culture. Third-world texts, even those
which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic-
necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story
of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very
different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at
first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of
reading?

I will offer, as something like the supreme example of this process of allegori-
zation, the first masterwork of China’s greatest writer, Lu Xun, whose neglect in
western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses based on ignorance

69

Fredric Jameson

can rectify. “Diary of a Madman” (1918) must at first be read by any western
reader as the protocol of what our essentially psychological language terms a
“nervous breakdown.” It offers the notes and perceptions of a subject in intensify-
ing prey to a terrifying psychic delusion, the conviction that the people around him
are concealing a dreadful secret, and that that secret can be none other than the

increasingly obvious fact that they are cannibals. At the climax of the development
of the delusion, which threatens his own physical safety and his very life itself as a

potential victim, the narrator understands that his own brother is himself a canni-
bal and that the death of their little sister, a number of years earlier, far from being
the result of childhood illness, as he had thought, was in reality a murder. As befits
the protocol of a psychosis, these perceptions are objective ones, which can be
rendered without any introspective machinery: the paranoid subject observes
sinister glances around him in the real world, he overhears tell-tale conversations
between his brother and an alleged physician (obviously in reality another canni-

bal) which carry all the conviction of the real, and can be objectively (or “realisti-

cally”) represented. This is not the place to demonstrate in any detail the absolute

pertinence, to Lu Xun’s case history, of the pre-eminent western or first-world

reading of such phenomena, namely Freud’s interpretation of the paranoid delu-
sions of Senatsprasident Schreber: an emptying of the world, a radical withdrawal
of libido (what Schreber describes as “world-catastrophe”), followed by the at-

tempt to recathect by the obviously imperfect mechanisms of paranoia. “The
delusion-formation,” Freud explains, “which we take to be a pathological pro-
duct, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.”7

What is reconstructed, however, is a grisly and terrifying objective real world
beneath the appearances of our own world: an unveiling or deconcealment of the

nightmarish reality of things, a stripping away of our conventional illusions or
rationalizations about daily life and existence. It is a process comparable, as a

literary effect, only to some of the processes of western modernism, and in particu-
lar of existentialism, in which narrative is employed as a powerful instrument for
the experimental exploration of reality and illusion, an exploration which, how-

ever, unlike some of the older realisms, presupposes a certain prior “personal
knowledge.” The reader must, in other words, have had some analogous experi-
ence, whether in physical illness or psychic crisis, of a lived and balefully trans-
formed real world from which we cannot even mentally escape, for the full horror
of Lu Xun’s nightmare to be appreciated. Terms like “depression” deform such

experience by psychologizing it and projecting it back into the pathological Other;
while the analogous western literary approaches to this same experience-I’m
thinking of the archetypal deathbed murmur of Kurtz, in Conrad’s “Heart of

Darkness,” “The horror! the horror!”-recontains precisely that horror by trans-

forming it into a rigorously private and subjective “mood,” which can only be

70

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

designated by recourse to an aesthetic of expression-the unspeakable, unname-
able inner feeling, whose external formulation can only designate it from without,
like a symptom.

But this representational power of Lu Xun’s text cannot be appreciated prop-
erly without some sense of what I have called its allegorical resonance. For it
should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by the sufferer in the
attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbors is at one and the same time being
attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole: and if this attribution
is to be called “figural,” it is indeed a figure more powerful and “literal” than the
“literal” level of the text. Lu Xun’s proposition is that the people of this great
maimed and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period,
his fellow citizens, are “literally” cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and
indeed intensified by the most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese cul-

ture, they must devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. This occurs at all levels
of that exceedingly hierarchical society, from lumpens and peasants all the way to
the most privileged elite positions in the mandarin bureaucracy. It is, I want to

stress, a social and historical nightmare, a vision of the horror of life specifically
grasped through History itself, whose consequences go far beyond the more local
western realistic or naturalistic representation of cut-throat capitalist or market

competition, and it exhibits a specifically political resonance absent from its
natural or mythological western equivalent in the nightmare of Darwinian natural
selection.

Now I want to offer four additional remarks about this text, which will touch,
respectively, on the libidinal dimension of the story, on the structure of its allegory,
on the role of the third-world cultural producer himself, and on the perspective of

futurity projected by the tale’s double resolution. I will be concerned, in dealing
with all four of these topics, to stress the radical structural difference between the

dynamics of third-world culture and those of the first-world cultural tradition in
which we have ourselves been formed.

I have suggested that in third-world texts such as this story by Lu Xun the

relationship between the libidinal and the political components of individual and
social experience is radically different from what obtains in the west and what

shapes our own cultural forms. Let me try to characterize this difference, or if you
like this radical reversal, by way of the following generalization: in the west,
conventionally, political commitment is recontained and psychologized or subjec-
tivized by way of the public-private split I have already evoked. Interpretations, for

example, of political movements of the 60s in terms of Oedipal revolts are familiar
to everyone and need no further comment. That such interpretations are episodes
in a much longer tradition, whereby political commitment is re-psychologized and
accounted for in terms of the subjective dynamics of ressentiment or the authorita-

71

Fredric Jameson

rian personality, is perhaps less well understood, but can be demonstrated by a
careful reading of anti-political texts from Nietzsche and Conrad all the way to the
latest cold-war propaganda.

What is relevant to our present context is not, however, the demonstration of
that proposition, but rather of its inversion in third-world culture, where I want to

suggest that psychology, or more specifically, libidinal investment, is to be read in

primarily political and social terms. (It is, I hope, unnecessary to add that what
follows is speculative and very much subject to correction by specialists: it is
offered as a methodological example rather than a “theory” of Chinese culture.)
We’re told, for on thing, that the great ancient imperial cosmologies identify by
analogy what we in the west analytically separate: thus, the classical sex manuals
are at one with the texts that reveal the dynamics of political forces, the charts of
the heavens at one with the logic of medical lore, and so forth.8 Here already then,
in an ancient past, western antinomies-and most particularly that between the

subjective and the public or political-are refused in advance. The libidinal center
of Lu Xun’s text is, however, not sexuality, but rather the oral stage, the whole

bodily question of eating, of ingestion, devoration, incorporation, from which
such fundamental categories as the pure and the impure spring. We must now
recall, not merely the extraordinary symbolic complexity of Chinese cuisine, but
also the central role this art and practice occupies in Chinese culture as a whole.
When we find that centrality confirmed by the observation that the very rich
Chinese vocabulary for sexual matters is extraordinarily intertwined with the

language of eating; and when we observe the multiple uses to which the verb “to
eat” is put in ordinary Chinese language (one “eats” a fear or a fright, for

example), we may feel in a somewhat better position to sense the enormous

sensitivity of this libidinal region, and of Lu Xun’s mobilization of it for the
dramatization of an essentially social nightmare-something which in a western
writer would be consigned to the realm of the merely private obsession, the vertical
dimension of the personal trauma.

A different alimentary transgression can be observed throughout Lu Xun’s
works, but nowhere quite so strikingly as in his terrible little story, “Medicine.”
The story potrays a dying child-the death of children is a constant in these
works-whose parents have the good fortune to procure an “infallible” remedy.
At this point we must recall both that traditional Chinese medicine is not “taken,”
as in the west, but “eaten,” and that for Lu Xun traditional Chinese medicine was
the supreme locus of the unspeakable and exploitative charlatanry of traditional
Chinese culture in general. In his crucially important Preface to the first collection
of his stories,9 he recounts the suffering and death of his own father from tuber-
culosis, while declining family reserves rapidly disappeared into the purchase of

expensive and rare, exotic and ludicrous medicaments. We will not sense the

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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

symbolic significance of this indignation unless we remember that for all these
reasons Lu Xun decided to study western medicine in Japan-the epitome of some
new western science that promised collective regeneration-only later to decide
that the production of culture-I am tempted to say, the elaboration of a political
culture-was a more effective form of political medicine.10 As a writer, then, Lu
Xun remains a diagnostician and a physician. Hence this terrible story, in which
the cure for the male child, the father’s only hope for survival in future genera-
tions, turns out to be one of those large doughy-white Chinese steamed rolls,
soaked in the blood of a criminal who has just been executed. The child dies

anyway, of course, but it is important to note that the hapless victim of a more

properly state violence (the supposed crimihal) was a political militant, whose

grave is mysteriously covered in flowers by absent sympathizers of whom one
knows nothing. In the analysis of a story like this, we must rethink our conven-
tional conception of the symbolic levels of a narrative (where sexuality and politics
might be in homology to each other, for instance) as a set of loops or circuits which
intersect and overdetermine each other-the enormity of therapeutic cannibalism

finally intersecting in a pauper’s cemetery, with the more overt violence of family
betrayal and political repression.

This new mapping process brings me to the cautionary remark I wanted to
make about allegory itself-a form long discredited in the west and the specific
target of the Romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge, yet a linguistic
structure which also seems to be experiencing a remarkable reawakening of in-
terest in contemporary literary theory. If allegory has once again become somehow

congenial for us today, as over against the massive and monumental unifications of
an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is because the allegorical
spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the
multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of
the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory-based, for instance, on

stereotypes of Bunyan-is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications
to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a
one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion
and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such

equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each per-
petual present of the text.

Here too Lu Xun has some lessons for us. This writer of short stories and

sketches, which never evolved into the novel form as such, produced at least one

approach to the longer form, in a much lengthier series of anecdotes about a

hapless coolie named Ah Q, who comes to serve, as we might have suspected, as
the allegory of a certain set of Chinese attitudes and modes of behavior. It is

interesting to note that the enlargement of the form determines a shift in tone or

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Fredric Jameson

generic discourse: now everything that had been stricken with the stillness and

emptiness of death and suffering without hope-“the room was not only too

silent, it was far too big as well, and the things in it were far too empty”‘–
becomes material for a more properly Chaplinesque comedy. Ah Q’s resiliency
springs from an unusual-but we are to understand culturally very normal and

familiar-technique for overcoming humiliation. When set upon by his perse-
cutors, Ah Q, serene in his superiority over them, reflects: “‘It is as if I were beaten

by my own son. What is the world coming to nowadays…’ Thereupon he too
would walk away, satisfied at having won.”12 Admit that you are not even human,
they insist, that you are nothing but an animal! On the contrary, he tells them, I’m
worse than an animal, I’m an insect! There, does that satisfy you? “In less than ten

seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking
that he was after all ‘number one in self-belittlement,’ and that after removing the
‘self-belittlement’ what remained was still the glory of remaining ‘number one.'”13
When one recalls the remarkable self-esteem of the Manchu dynasty in its final
throes, and the serene contempt for foreign devils who had nothing but modern

science, gunboats, armies, technology and power to their credit, one achieves a
more precise sense of the historical and social topicality of Lu Xun’s satire.

Ah Q is thus, allegorically, China itself. What I want to observe, however,
what complicates the whole issue, is that his persecutors-the idlers and bullies
who find their daily pleasures in getting a rise out of just such miserable victims.as
Ah Q-they too are China, in the allegorical sense. This very simple example,
then, shows the capacity of allegory to generate a range of distinct meanings or

messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places: Ah Q
is China humiliated by the foreigners, a China so well versed in the spiritual
techniques of self-justification that such humiliations are not even registered, let
alone recalled. But the persecutors are also China, in a different sense, the terrible
self-cannibalistic China of the “Diary of a Madman,” whose response to power-
lessness is the senseless persecution of the weaker and more inferior members of
the hierarchy.

All of which slowly brings us to the question of the writer himself in the third
world, and to what must be called the function of the intellectual, it being under-
stood that in the third-world situation the intellectual is always in one way or
another a political intellectual. No third-world lesson is more timely or more

urgent for us today, among whom the very term “intellectual” has withered away,
as though it were the name for an extinct species. Nowhere has the strangeness of
this vacant position been brought home to me more strongly than on a recent trip
to Cuba, when I had occasion to visit a remarkable college-preparatory school on
the outskirts of Havana. It is a matter of some shame for an American to witness
the cultural curriculum in a socialist setting which also very much identifies itself

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with the third world. Over some three or four years, Cuban teenagers study poems
of Homer, Dante’s Inferno, the Spanish theatrical classics, the great realistic novels
of the 19th-century European tradition, and finally contemporary Cuban re-

volutionary novels, of which, incidentally, we desperately need English transla-
tions. But the semester’s work I found most challenging was one explicitly devoted
to the study of the role of the intellectual as such: the cultural intellectual who is
also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis.
The Cuban illustrations of this process-Ho Chi Minh and Augustino Nieto-are

obviously enough culturally determined: our own equivalents would probably be
the more familiar figures of DuBois and C.L.R. James, of Sartre and Neruda or

Brecht, of Kollontai or Louise Michel. But as this whole talk aims implicitly at

suggesting a new conception of the humanities in American education today, it is

appropriate to add that the study of the role of the intellectual as such ought to be
a key component in any such proposals.

I’ve already said something about Lu Xun’s own conception of his vocation,
and its extrapolation from the practice of medicine. But there is a great deal more
to be said specifically about the Preface. Not only is it one of the fundamental
documents for understanding the situation of the third world artist, it is also a
dense text in its own right, fully as much a work of art as any of the greatest
stories. And in Lu Xun’s own work it is the supreme example of the very unusual
ratio of subjective investment and a deliberately depersonalized objective narra-
tion. We have no time to do justice to those relationships, which would demand a

line-by-line commentary. Yet I will quote the little fable by which Lu Xun, re-

sponding to requests for publication by his friends and future collaborators,
dramatizes his dilemma:

Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many
people fast sleep inside who will shortly die of suffocation. But you know that
since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you
cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few
suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good
turn?14

The seemingly hopeless situation of the third-world intellectual in this historical
period (shortly after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but also after
the bankruptcy of the middle-class revolution had become apparent)-in which
no solutions, no forms of praxis or change, seem conceivable-this situation will
find its parallel, as we shall see shortly, in the situation of African intellectuals after
the achievement of independence, when once again no political solutions seem
present or visible on the historical horizon. The formal or literary manifestation of

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76 Fredric Jameson

this political problem is the possibility of narrative closure, something we will
return to more specifically.

In a more general theoretical context-and it is this theoretical form of the

problem I should now like at least to thematize and set in place on the agenda-we
must recover a sense of what “cultural revolution” means, in its strongest form, in
the marxist tradition. The reference is not to the immediate events of that violent
and tumultuous interruption of the “eleven years” in recent Chinese history, al-

though some reference to Maoism as a doctrine is necessarily implicit. The term,
we are told, was Lenin’s own, and in that form explicitly designated the literacy
campaign and the new problems of universal scholarity and education: something
of which Cuba, again, remains the most stunning and successful example in recent

history. We must, however, enlarge the conception still further, to include a range
of seemingly very different preoccupations, of which the names of Gramsci and
Wilhelm Reich, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Rudolph Bahro, and Paolo
Freire, may give an indication of their scope and focus. Overhastily, I will suggest
that “cultural revolution” as it is projected in such works turns on the phenome-
non of what Gramsci called “subalternity,” namely the feelings of mental inferior-

ity and habits of subservience and obedience which necessarily and structurally
develop in situations of domination-most dramatically in the experience of col-
onized peoples. But here, as so often, the subjectivizing and psychologizing habits
of first-world peoples such as ourselves can play us false and lead us into misun-

derstandings. Subalternity is not in that sense a psychological matter, although it

governs psychologies; and I suppose that the strategic choice of the term “cul-
tural” aims precisely at restructuring that view of the problem and projecting it
outwards into the realm of objective or collective spirit in some non-psychological,
but also non-reductionist or non-economistic, materialistic fashion. When a

psychic structure is objectively determined by economic and political relation-

ships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it

equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the
economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a
baleful and crippling residual effect.15 This is a more dramatic form of that old

mystery, the unity of theory and practice; and it is specifically in the context of this

problem of cultural revolution (now so strange and alien to us) that the achieve-
ments and failures of third-world intellectuals, writers and artists must be re-

placed if their concrete historical meaning is to be grasped. We have allowed
ourselves, as first-world cultural intellectuals, to restrict our consciousness of our
life’s work to the narrowest professional or bureaucratic terms, thereby encourag-
ing in ourselves a special sense of subalternity and guilt, which only reinforces the
vicious circle. That a literary article could be a political act, with real consequ-
ences, is for most of us little more than a curiosity of the literary history of Czarist

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

Russia or of modern China itself. But we perhaps should also consider the possibil-
ity that as intellectuals we ourselves are at present soundly sleeping in that inde-
structable iron room, of which Lu Xun spoke, on the point of suffocation.

The matter of narrative closure, then, and of the relationship of a narrative
text to futurity and to some collective project yet to come, is not, merely a formal
or literary-critical issue. “Diary of a Madman” has in fact two distinct and incom-

patible endings, which prove instructive to examine in light of the writer’s own
hesitations and anxieties about his social role. One ending, that of the deluded

subject himself, is very much a call to the future, in the impossible situation of a

well-nigh universal cannibalism: the last desperate lines launched into the void are
the words, “Save the children . .” But the tale has a second ending as well, which
is disclosed on the opening page, when the older (supposedly cannibalistic)
brother greets the narrator with the following cheerful remark: “I appreciate your
coming such a long way to see us, but my brother recovered some time ago and has

gone elsewhere to take up an official post.” So, in advance, the nightmare is

annulled; the paranoid visionary, his brief and terrible glimpse of the grisly reality
beneath the appearance now vouchsafed, gratefully returns to the realm of illusion
and oblivion therein again to take up his place in the space of bureaucratic power
and privilege. I want to suggest that it is only at this price, by way of a complex
play of simultaneous and antithetical messages, that the narrative text is able to

open up a concrete perspective on the real future.

x- x- *s-

I must interrupt myself here to interpolate several observations before pro-
ceeding. For one thing, it is clear to me that any articulation of radical
difference-that of gender, incidentally, fully as much as that of culture-is sus-

ceptible to appropriation by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the
context of the Middle East, called “orientalism.” It does not matter much that the
radical otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in
the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and once that
has been accomplished, the mechanism Said denounces has been set in place. On
the other hand, I don’t see how a first-world intellectual can avoid this operation
without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism: it
seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort
to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situa-
tions.

But at this point one should insert a cautionary reminder about the dangers of
the concept of “culture” itself: the very speculative remarks I have allowed myself
to make about Chinese “culture” will not be complete unless I add that “culture”
in this sense is by no means the final term at which one stops. One must imagine

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such cultural structures and attitudes as having been themselves, in the beginning,
vital responses to infrastructural realities (economic and geographic, for example),
as attempts to resolve more fundamental contradictions-attempts which then
outlive the situations for which they were devised, and survive, in reified forms, as
“cultural patterns.” Those patterns themselves then become part of the objective
situation confronted by later generations, and, as in the case of Confucianism,
having once been part of the solution to a dilemma, then become part of the new

problem.
Nor can I feel that the concept of cultural “identity” or even national “iden-

tity” is adequate. One cannot acknowledge the justice of the general poststruc-
turalist assault on the so-called “centered subject,” the old unified ego of

bourgeois individualism, and then resuscitate this same ideological mirage of

psychic unification on the collective level in the form of a doctrine of collective

identity. Appeals to collective identity need to be evaluated from a historical

perspective, rather than from the standpoint of some dogmatic and placeless
“ideological analysis.” When a third-world writer invokes this (to us) ideological
value, we need to examine the concrete historical situation closely in order to
determine the political consequences of the strategic use of this concept. Lu Xun’s
moment, for example, is very clearly one in which a critique of Chinese “culture”
and “cultural identity” has powerful and revolutionary consequences-
consequences which may not obtain in a later social configuration. This is then,
perhaps, another and more complicated way of raising the issue of “nationalism”
to which I referred earlier.

As far as national allegory is concerned, I think it may be appropriate to stress
its presence in what is generally considered western literature in order to under-
score certain structural differences. The example I have in mind is the work of
Benito Perez Galdos-the last and among the richest achievements of 19th century
realism. Galdos’ novels are more visibly allegorical (in the national sense) than
most of their better-known European predecessors: 16 something that might well be

explained in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system terminology.17 Al-

though 19th century Spain is not strictly peripheral after the fashion of the coun-
tries we are here designating under the term third world, it is certainly semi-

peripheral in his sense, when contrasted with England or France. It is therefore not

terribly surprising to find the situation of the male protagonist of Fortunata y
Jacinta (1887)-alternating between the two women of the title, between the wife
and the mistress, between the woman of the upper-middle classes and the woman
of the “people”-characterized in terms of the nation-state itself, hesitating be-
tween the republican revolution of 1868 and the Bourbon restoration of 1873.18
Here too, the same “floating” or transferable structure of allegorical reference
detected in Ah Q comes into play: for Fortunata is also married, and the alterna-

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tion of “revolution” and “restoration” is likewise adapted to her situation, as she
leaves her legal home to seek her lover and then returns to it in abandonment.

What it is important to stress is not merely the wit of the analogy as Galdos
uses it, but also its optional nature: we can use it to convert the entire situation of
the novel into an allegorical commentary on the destiny of Spain, but we are also
free to reverse its priorities and to read the political analogy as metaphorical
decoration for the individual drama, and as a mere figural intensification of this
last. Here, far from dramatizing the identity of the political and the individual or

psychic, the allegorical structure tends essentially to separate these levels in some
absolute way. We cannot feel its force unless we are convinced of the radical
difference between politics and the libidinal: so that its operation reconfirms

(rather than annuls) that split between public and private which was attributed to
western civilization earlier in our discussion. In one of the more powerful contem-

porary denunciations of this split and this habit, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a

conception of desire that is at once social and individual.

How does a delirium begin? Perhaps the cinema is able to capture the movement
of madness, precisely because it is not analytical or regressive, but explores a
global field of coexistence. Witness a film by Nicholas Ray, supposedly represent-
ing the formation of a cortisone delirium: an overworked father, a high-school
teacher who works overtime for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart
trouble. He begins to rave about the educational system in general, the need to
restore a pure race, the salvation of the social and moral order, then he passes to
religion, the timeliness of a return to the Bible, Abraham. But what in fact did
Abraham do? Well now, he killed or wanted to kill his son, and perhaps God’s
only error lies in having stayed his hand. But doesn’t this man, the film’s pro-
tagonist, have a son of his own? Hmmm…. What the film shows so well, to the
shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field
that is social, economic, political cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and
religious: the delirious person applies a delirium to his family and his son that
overreaches them on all sides.19

I am not myself sure that the objective consequences of this essentially social
and concrete gap, in first-world experience, between the public and the private can
be abolished by intellectual diagnosis or by some more adequate theory of their

deeper interrelationship. Rather, it seems to me that what Deleuze and Guattari
are proposing here is a new and more adequate allegorical reading of this film.
Such allegorical structures, then, are not so much absent from first-world cultural
texts as they are unconscious, and therefore they must be deciphered by interpre-
tive mechanisms that necessarily entail a whole social and historical critique of our
current first-world situation. The point here is that, in distinction to the uncon-

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scious allegories of our own cultural texts, third-world national allegories are
conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationship of

politics to libidinal dynamics.
* * *

Now, before turning to the African texts, I remind you of the very special occasion
of the present talk, which is concerned to honor the memory of Robert C. Elliott
and to commemorate his life’s work. I take it that the very center of his two most

important books, The Power of Satire and The Shape of Utopia,20 is to be found in
his pathbreaking association of satire and the utopian impulse as two seemingly
antithetical drives (and literary discourses), which in reality replicate each other
such that each is always secretly active within the other’s sphere of influence. All
satire, he taught us, necessarily carries a utopian frame of reference within itself;
all utopias, no matter how serene or disembodied, are driven secretly by the
satirist’s rage at a fallen reality. When I spoke of futurity a moment ago, I took
pains to withhold the world “utopia,” which in my language is another word for
the socialist project.

But now I will be more explicit and take as my motto an astonishing passage
from the novel Xala, by the great contemporary Senegalese novelist and film-
maker Ousmane Sembene. The title designates a ritual curse or affliction, of a very
special kind, which has been visited on a prosperous and corrupt Senegalese
businessman at the moment in which, at the height of his fortune, he takes to
himself a beautiful young (third) wife. Shades of The Power of Satire!, the curse is
of course, as you may have guessed, sexual impotence. The Hadj, the unfortunate
hero of this novel, desperately explores a number of remedies, both western and
tribal, to no avail, and is finally persuaded to undertake a laborious trip into the
hinterland of Dakar to seek out a shaman of reputedly extraordinary powers. Here
is the conclusion of his hot and dusty journey in a horse-drawn cart:

As they emerged from a ravine, they saw conical thatched roofs, grey-black with
weathering, standing out against the horizon in the middle of the empty plain.
Free-ranging, skinny cattle with dangerous-looking horns fenced with one
another to get at what little grass there was. No more than silhouettes in the
distance, a few people were busy around the only well. The driver of the cart was
in familiar territory and greeted people as they passed. Sereen Mada’s house,
apart from its imposing size, was identical in construction with all the others. It
was situated in the center of the village whose huts were arranged in a semi-circle,
which you entered by a single main entrance. The village had neither shop nor
school nor dispensary; there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact [Ous-
mane concludes, then he adds, as if in afterthought, this searing line:] There was
nothing at all attractive about it in fact. Its life was based on the principles of
community interdependence.21

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Here, then, more emblematically than virtually any other text I know, the space of
a past and future utopia-a social world of collective cooperation-is dramati-

cally inserted into the corrupt and westernized money economy of the new post-
independence national or comprador bourgeoisie. Indeed, Ousmane takes pains to
show us that the Hadj is not an industrialist, that his business is in no sense

productive, but functions as a middle-man between European multinationals and
local extraction industries. To this biographical sketch must be added a very
significant fact: that in his youth, the Hadj was political, and spent some time in

jail for his nationalist and pro-independence activities. The extraordinary satire of
these corrupt classes (which Ousmane will extend to the person of Senghor him-
self in The Last of the Empire) is explicitly marked as the failure of the indepen-
dence movement to develop into a general social revolution.

The fact of nominal national independence, in Latin America in the 19th

century, in Africa in the mid-20th, puts an end to a movement for which genuine
national autonomy was the only conceivable goal. Nor is this symbolic myopia the

only problem: the African states also had to face the crippling effects of what
Fanon prophetically warned them against-to receive independence is not the
same as to take it, since it is in the revolutionary struggle itself that new social

relationships and a new consciousness is developed. Here again the history of
Cuba is instructive: Cuba was the last of the Latin American nations to win its
freedom in the 19th century-a freedom which would immediately be taken in

charge by another greater colonial power. We now know the incalculable role

played in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 by the protracted guerrilla struggles of the
late 19th century (of which the figure of Jose Marti is the emblem); contemporary
Cuba would not be the same without that laborious and subterranean, one wants
to say Thompsonian, experience of the mole of History burrowing through a

lengthy past and creating its specific traditions in the process.
So it is that after the poisoned gift of independence, radical African writers

like Ousmane, or like Ngugi in Kenya, find themselves back in the dilemma of Lu
Xun, bearing a passion for change and social regeneration which has not yet found
its agents. I hope it is clear that this is also very much an aesthetic dilemma, a crisis
of representation: it was not difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another

language and wore the visible trappings of colonial occupation. When those are

replaced by your own people, the connections to external controlling forces are
much more difficult to represent. The newer leaders may of course throw off their
masks and reveal the person of the Dictator, whether in its older individual or
newer military form: but this moment also determines problems of representation.
The dictator novel has become a virtual genre of Latin American literature, and
such works are marked above all by a profound and uneasy ambivalence, a deeper
ultimate sympathy for the Dictator, which can perhaps only be properly accounted

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Fredric Jameson

for by some enlarged social variant of the Freudian mechanism of transference.22
The form normally taken by a radical diagnosis of the failures of contempor-

ary third-world societies is, however, what is conventionally designated as “cul-
tural imperialism,” a faceless influence without representable agents, whose liter-

ary expression seems to demand the invention of new forms: Manuel Puig’s Be-

trayed by Rita Hayworth may be cited as one of the most striking and innovative of
those. One is led to conclude that under these circumstances traditional realism is
less effective than the satiric fable: whence to my mind the greater power of certain
of Ousmane’s narratives (besides Xala, we should mention The Money-Order) as
over against Ngugi’s impressive but problematical Petals of Blood.

With the fable, however, we are clearly back into the whole question of

allegory. The Money-Order mobilizes the traditional Catch-22 dilemma-its hap-
less protagonist cannot cash his Parisian check without identity papers, but since
he was born long before independence there are no documents, and meanwhile the

money-order, uncashed, begins to melt away before an accumulation of new cre-
dits and new debts. I am tempted to suggest, anachronistically, that this work,
published in 1965, prophetically dramatizes the greatest misfortune that can hap-
pen to a third-world country in our time, namely the discovery of vast amounts of
oil resources-something which as economists have shown us, far from represent-
ing salvation, at once sinks them incalculably into foreign debts they can never
dream of liquidating.

On another level, however, this tale raises the issue of what must finally be one
of the key problems in any analysis of Ousmane’s work, namely the ambiguous
role played in it by archaic or tribal elements. Viewers may perhaps remember the
curious ending of his first film, The Black Girl, in which the European employer is

inconclusively pursued by the little boy wearing an archaic mask; meanwhile such
historical films as Ceddo or Emitai seem intent on evoking older moments of tribal
resistance either to Islam or to the west, yet in a historical perspective which with
few exceptions is that of failure and ultimate defeat. Ousmane cannot, however, be
suspected of any archaizing or nostalgic cultural nationalism. Thus it becomes
important to determine the significance of this appeal to older tribal values, par-
ticularly as they are more subtly active in modern works like Xala or The
Money-Order.

I suspect that the deeper subject of this second novel is not so much the
evident one of the denunciation of a modern national bureaucracy, but rather the
historical transformation of the traditional Islamic value of alms-giving in a con-
temporary money economy. A Muslim has the duty to give alms-indeed, the
work concludes with just such another unfulfilled request. Yet in a modern
economy, this sacred duty to the poor is transformed into a frenzied assault by
free-loaders from all the levels of society (at length, the cash is appropriated by a

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westernized and affluent, influential cousin). The hero is literally picked clean by
the vultures; better still, the unsought for, unexpected treasure fallen from heaven
at once transforms the entire society around him into ferocious and insatiable

petitioners, in something like a monetary version of Lu Xun’s cannibalism.
The same double historical perspective-archaic customs radically trans-

formed and denatured by the superposition of capitalist relations-seems to me
demonstrable in Xala as well, in the often hilarious results of the more ancient
Islamic and tribal institution of polygamy. This is what Ousmane has to say about
that institution (it being understood that authorial intervention, no longer tolera-
ble in realistic narrative, is still perfectly suitable to the allegorical fable as a form):

It is worth knowing something about the life led by urban polygamists. It could
be called geographical polygamy, as opposed to rural polygamy, where all the
wives and children live together in the same compound. In the town, since the
families are scattered, the children have little contact with their father. Because of
his way of life the father must go from house to house, villa to villa, and is only
there in the evenings, at bedtime. He is therefore primarily a source of finance,
when he has work.23

Indeed, we are treated to the vivid spectacle of the Hadj’s misery when, at the
moment of his third marriage, which should secure his social status, he realizes he
has no real home of his own and is condemned to shuttle from one wife’s villa to
the other, in a situation in which he suspects each of them in turn as being
responsible for his ritual affliction. But the passage I have just read shows that-
whatever one would wish to think about polygamy in and of itself as an
institution-it functions here as a twin-valenced element designed to open up
historical perspective. The more and more frenzied trips of the Hadj through the

great city secure a juxtaposition between capitalism and the older collective tribal
form of social life.

These are not as yet, however, the most remarkable feature of Xala, which can
be described as a stunning and controlled, virtually text-book exercise in what I
have elsewhere called “generic discontinuities.”24 The novel begins, in effect, in
one generic convention, in terms of which the Hadj is read as a comic victim.

Everything goes wrong all at once, and the news of his disability suddenly triggers
a greater misfortune: his numerous debtors begin to descend on someone whose
bad luck clearly marks him out as a loser. A comic pity and terror accompanies
this process, though it does not imply any great sympathy for the personage.
Indeed it conveys a greater revulsion against the privileged new westernized society
in which this rapid overturning of the wheel of fortune can take place. Yet we have
all been in error, as it turns out: the wives have not been the source of the ritual

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Fredric Jameson

curse. In an abrupt generic reversal and enlargement (comparable to some of the
mechanisms Freud describes in “The Uncanny”), we suddenly learn something
new and chilling about the Hadj’s past:

“Out story goes back a long way. It was shortly before your marriage to that
woman there. Don’t you remember? I was sure you would not. What I am now”
(a beggar in rags is addressing him) “what I am now is your fault. Do you
remember selling a large piece of land at Jeko belonging to our clan? After
falsifying the clan names with the complicity of people in high places, you took
our land from us. In spite of our protests, our proof of ownership, we lost our
case in the courts. Not satisfied with taking our land you had me thrown into
prison.”25

Thus the primordial crime of capitalism is exposed: not so much wage labor
as such, or the ravages of the money form, or the remorseless and impersonal
rhythms of the market, but rather this primal displacement of the older forms of
collective life from a land now seized and privatized. It is the oldest of modern

tragedies, visited on the Native Americans yesterday, on the Palestinians today,
and significantly reintroduced by Ousmane into his film version of The Money-
Order (called Mandabi), in which the protagonist is now threatened with the
imminent loss of his dwelling itself.

The point I want to make about this terrible “return of the repressed,” is that
it determines a remarkable generic transformation of the narrative: suddenly we
are no longer in satire, but in ritual. The beggars and the lumpens, led by Sereen
Mada himself, descend on the Hadj and require him to submit, for the removal of
his xala, to an abominable ceremony of ritual humiliation and abasement. The

representational space of the narrative is lifted to a new generic realm, which
reaches back to touch the powers of the archaic even as it foretells the utopian
destruction of the fallen present in the mode of prophecy. The word “Brechtian,”
which inevitably springs to mind, probably does inadequate justice to these new
forms which have emerged from a properly third-world reality. Yet in light of this

unexpected generic ending, the preceding satiric text is itself retroactively trans-
formed. From a satire whose subject-matter or content was the ritual curse visited
on a character within the narrative, it suddenly becomes revealed as a ritual curse
in its own right-the entire imagined chain of events becomes Ousmane’s own
curse upon his hero and people like him. No more stunning confirmation could be
adduced for Robert C. Elliott’s great insight into the anthropological origins of
satiric discourse in real acts of shamanistic malediction.

I want to conclude with a few thoughts on why all this should be so and on
the origins and status of what I have identified as the primacy of national allegory
in third-world culture. We are, after all, familiar with the mechanisms of auto-

84

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

referentiality in contemporary western literature: is this not simply to be taken as
another form of that, in a structurally distinct social and cultural context?

Perhaps. But in that case our priorities must be reversed for proper understanding
of this mechanism. Consider the disrepute of social allegory in our culture and the

well-nigh inescapable operation of social allegory in the west’s Other. These two

contrasting realities are to be grasped, I think, in terms of situational conscious-
ness, an expression I prefer to the more common term materialism. Hegel’s old

analysis of the Master-Slave relationship26 may still be the most effective way of

dramatizing this distinction between two cultural logics. Two equals struggle each
for recognition by the other: the one is willing to sacrifice life for this supreme
value. The other, a heroic coward in the Brechtian, Schweykian sense of loving the

body and the material world too well, gives in, in order to continue life. The
Master-now the fulfillment of a baleful and inhuman feudal-aristocratic disdain
for life without honor-proceeds to enjoy the benefits of his recognition by the

other, now become his humble serf or slave. But at this point two distinct and

dialectically ironic reversals take place: only the Master is now genuinely human,
so that “recognition” by this henceforth sub-human form of life which is the slave

evaporates at the moment of its attainment and offers no genuine satisfaction.
“The truth of the Master,” Hegel observes grimly, “is the Slave; while the truth of
the Slave, on the other hand, is the Master.” But a second reversal is in process as
well: for the slave is called upon to labor for the master and to furnish him with all
the material benefits befitting his supremacy. But this means that, in the end, only
the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave
can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is pre-
cisely to that that he is condemned. The Master, however, is condemned to
idealism-to the luxury of a placeless freedom in which any consciousness of his
own concrete situation flees like a dream, like a word unremembered on the tip of
the tongue, a nagging doubt which the puzzled mind is unable to formulate.

It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of
that very same position. The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and
reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the

poverty of the individual experience of isolated monads, to dying individual bodies
without collective pasts or futures bereft of any possibility of grasping the social

totality. This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the

luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the “nightmare of

history,” but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the

“projections” of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to third-world culture,
which must be situational and materialist despite itself. And it is this, finally,
which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture, where the

telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately

85

Fredric Jameson

involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.
I hope I have suggested the epistemological priority of this unfamiliar kind of

allegorical vision; but I must admit that old habits die hard, and that for us such
unaccustomed exposure to reality, or to the collective totality, is often intolerable,
leaving us in Quentin’s position at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, murmuring the

great denial, “I don’t hate the Third World! I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!”
Even that resistance is instructive, however; and we may well feel, confronted

with the daily reality of the other two-thirds of the globe, that “there was nothing
at all attractive about it in fact.” But we must not allow ourselves that feeling
without also acknowledging its ultimate mocking completion: “Its life was based
on the principles of community interdependence.”

NOTES

1. The whole matter of nationalism should perhaps be rethought, as Benedict Anderson’s interest-

ing essay Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), and Tom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain

(London: New Left Books, 1977) invite us to do.
2. I have argued elsewhere for the importance of mass culture and science fiction. See “Reification

and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text no. 1 (1979), 130-148.
3. The essay was written for an immediate occasion-the third memorial lecture in honor of my

late colleague and friend Robert C. Elliot at the University of California, San Diego. It is essentially

reprinted as given.
4. William Bennett, “To Reclaim a Legacy,” Text of a report on the Humanities, Chronicle of

Higher Education, XXIX, 14 (Nov. 28, 1984), pp. 16-21.
5. The classic texts are F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)

and the earlier, but only more recently published section of Marx’s Grundrisse, often called “Pre-

capitalist economic formations,” trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: NLB/Penguin, 1973), pp. 471-514.

See also Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and “Primitive” Societies, trans. M. Klopper, (New York:

Monthly Review, 1972); Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Savages, Barbarians,
Civilized Men,” in Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota press, 1983), pp. 139-271.

Besides mode-of-production theory, whose validity is in any case widely debated, there have also

appeared in recent years a number of important synthesizing works on third-world history as a unified
field. Three works in particular deserve mention: Global Rift, by L.S. Stavrianos (Morrow, 1981);
Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf (California, 1982), and The Three Worlds, by
Peter Worsley (Chicago, 1984). Such works suggest a more general methodological consequence im-

plicit in the present essay but which should be stated explicitly here: first, that the kind of comparative
work demanded by this concept of third-world literature involves comparison, not of the individual

texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other, but of the concrete situations
from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses; and second, that such an

approach suggests the possibility of a literary and cultural comparatism of a new type, distantly
modelled on the new comparative history of Barrington Moore and exemplified in books like Theda
Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions or Eric Wolf’s Peasant Revolutions of the 20th Century. Such a

86

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

new cultural comparatism would juxtapose the study of the differences and similarities of specific
literary and cultural texts with a more typological analysis of the various socio-cultural situations from
which they spring, an analysis whose variables would necessarily include such features as the inter-

relationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the

configuration of traditional forms, the relationship to western influences, the development of urban

experience and money, and so forth. Such comparatism, however, need not be restricted to third-world
literature.

6. See for example, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books,
1974), pp. 435-549.

7. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of

Paranoia,” trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1958), Volume XII, p. 457.

8. See for example Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, trans. E.W. Dickes, (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1977), p. 105: “When we hear of alchemy, or read books about it we should

always keep in mind that many of these books can also be read as books of sex; in a similar way, books
on the art of war, too, can be read as books on sexual relations.”

9. Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi (Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 1972), pp. 1-6.

10. Ibid., pp. 2-3.
11. Ibid., p. 40.
12. Ibid., p. 72.
13. Ibid. I am indebted to Peter Rushton for some of these observations.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15. Socialism will become a reality, Lenin observes, “when the necessity of observing the simple,

fundamental rules of human intercourse” has “become a habit.” (State and Revolution [Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1973], p. 122.)

16. See the interesting discussions in Stephen Gilman, Gald6s and the Art of the European Novel:
1867-18

87

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

17. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
18. For example: “El Delfin habia entrado, desde los dltimos dias del 74, en aquel periodo

sedante que seguia infaliblemente a sus desvarios. En realidad, no era aquello virtud, sino casancio del
pecado; no era el sentimiento puro y regular del orden, sino el hastio de la revoluci6n. Verificibase en el
lo que don Baldomero habia dicho del pais: que padecia fiebres alternativas de libertad y de paz.”
Fortunata y Jacinta (Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1968), p. 585 (Part III, chapter 2, section 2).

19. Deluze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 274.
20. Princeton University Press, 1960; and University of Chicago Press, 1970, respectively.
21. Sembene Ousmane, Xala, trans. Clive Wake, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1976), p. 69.
22. I am indebted to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga for the suggestion that in the Latin American novel

this ambivalence may be accounted for by the fact that the archetypal Dictator, while oppressing his
own people, is also perceived as resisting North American influence.

23. Xala, op. cit., p. 66.

24. “Generic Discontinuities in Science Fiction: Brian Aldiss’ Starship,” Science Fiction Studies
#2 (1973), pp. 57-68.

25. Xala, op. cit., pp. 110-111.
26. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977): Section B, Chapter IV, Part A-3, “Lordship and Bondage,” pp. 111-119. The other basic
philosophical underpinning of this argument is Lukacs’ epistemology in History and Class Conscious-

87

Fredric Jameson

ness according to which “mapping” or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the
dominated rather than the dominating classes. “Mapping” is a term I have used in “Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” (New Left Review #146 [July-August, 1984], pp. 53-92).
What is here called “national allegory” is clearly a form of just such mapping of the totality, so that the

present essay-which sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature-forms a

pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperalism of the first
world and above all of the United States.

New Political Science
Summer 1986 No. 15
Literature and Politics

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“On the Declaration of Independence”

M. Blanchot
“Marx’s Three Voices”

Plus
J. Arac, “Mathiessen and the American

Renaissance.”
D. Sommer, “Whitman and the Liberal Self.”
C. Kay, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam

Smith.”
T. Norton, “Deleuze and Political Science

Fiction.”

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88

• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. i-xii+1-144
Front Matter [pp. i – i]
Introduction [pp. iii – xii]
Special Section on Cuba
Our America and the West [pp. 1 – 25]
La Vida Real [pp. 26 – 31]
Women and Poetry in Cuba [pp. 32 – 40]
Interviews with Cuban Artists [pp. 41 – 53]
Bad Taste in Good Form [pp. 54 – 64]
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism [pp. 65 – 88]
Aesthetics and Foreign Policy [pp. 89 – 98]
Soviet-Cuban Involvement in Central America: A Critique of Recent Writings [pp. 99 – 125]
Marxism and Post-Marxism [pp. 126 – 135]
Unequal Developments
Maximum Security [pp. 136 – 139]
Forgetting Baudrillard [pp. 140 – 144]
Back Matter

The Translation Studies Reader

Edited by

Lawrence Venuti

Advisory Editor: Mona Baker

London and New York

First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simulataneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

© 2000 This collection and editorial matter © Lawrence Venuti;
individual essays © individual contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Translation studies reader/edited by Lawrence Venuti.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting. I. Venuti, Lawrence.

P306.T7436 2000
418′.02–dc21 99–36161

CIP

ISBN 0-203-44662-3 Master e-book ISBN

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ISBN 0-415-18747-8 (Pbk)

Chapter 14

George Steiner

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION, the act of elicitation and appropriative transferof meaning, is fourfold. There is initiative trust, an investment of belief,
underwritten by previous experience but epistemologically exposed and
psychologically hazardous, in the meaningfulness, in the “seriousness” of the facing
or, strictly speaking, adverse text. We venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there
is “something there” to be understood, that the transfer will not be void. All
understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is
translation, starts with an act of trust. This confiding will, ordinarily, be
instantaneous and unexamined, but it has a complex base. It is an operative
convention which derives from a sequence of phenomenological assumptions about
the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps
formally antithetical semantic systems, about the validity of analogy and parallel.
The radical generosity of the translator (“I grant beforehand that there must be
something there”), his trust in the “other”, as yet untried, unmapped alternity of
statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards
seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in which “this” can stand
for “that”, and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be meanings and
structures.

But the trust can never be final. It is betrayed, trivially, by nonsense, by the
discovery that “there is nothing there” to elicit and translate. Nonsense rhymes,
poésie concrète, glossolalia are untranslatable because they are lexically non-
communicative or deliberately insignificant. The commitment of trust will,
however, be tested, more or less severely, also in the common run and process of
language acquisition and translation (the two being intimately connected). “This
means nothing” asserts the exasperated child in front of his Latin reader or the

1975

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION 187

beginner at Berlitz. The sensation comes very close to being tactile, as of a
blank, sloping surface which gives no purchase. Social incentive, the officious
evidence of precedent—“others have managed to translate this bit before you”—
keeps one at the task. But the donation of trust remains ontologically
spontaneous and anticipates proof, often by a long, arduous gap (there are texts,
says Walter Benjamin, which will be translated only “after us”). As he sets out,
the translator must gamble on the coherence, on the symbolic plenitude of the
world. Concomitantly he leaves himself vulnerable, though only in extremity and
at the theoretical edge, to two dialectically related, mutually determined
metaphysical risks. He may find that “anything” or “almost anything” can mean
“everything”. This is the vertigo of self-sustaining metaphoric or analogic
enchainment experienced by medieval exegetists. Or he may find that there is
“nothing there” which can be divorced from its formal autonomy, that every
meaning worth expressing is monadic and will not enter into any alternative
mould. There is Kabbalistic speculation, to which I will return, about a day on
which words will shake off “the burden of having to mean” and will be only
themselves, blank and replete as stone.

After trust comes aggression. The second move of the translator is incursive
and extractive. The relevant analysis is that of Heidegger when he focuses our
attention on understanding as an act, on the access, inherently appropriative and
therefore violent, of Erkenntnis to Dasein. Da-sein, the “thing there”, “the thing
that is because it is there”, only comes into authentic being when it is
comprehended, i.e. translated.1 The postulate that all cognition is aggressive,
that every proposition is an inroad on the world, is, of course, Hegelian. It is
Heidegger’s contribution to have shown that understanding, recognition,
interpretation are a compacted, unavoidable mode of attack. We can modulate
Heidegger’s insistence that understanding is not a matter of method but of
primary being, that “being consists in the understanding of other being” into the
more naïve, limited axiom that each act of comprehension must appropriate
another entity (we translate into). Comprehension, as its etymology shows,
“comprehends” not only cognitively but by encirclement and ingestion. In the
event of interlingual translation this manoeuvre of comprehension is explicitly
invasive and exhaustive. Saint Jerome uses his famous image of meaning brought
home captive by the translator. We “break” a code: decipherment is dissective,
leaving the shell smashed and the vital layers stripped. Every schoolchild, but
also the eminent translator, will note the shift in substantive presence which
follows on a protracted or difficult exercise in translation: the text in the other
language has become almost materially thinner, the light seems to pass
unhindered through its loosened fibres. For a spell the density of hostile or
seductive “otherness” is dissipated. Ortega y Gasset speaks of the sadness of the
translator after failure. There is also a sadness after success, the Augustinian
tristitia which follows on the cognate acts of erotic and of intellectual possession.

The translator invades, extracts, and brings home. The simile is that of the
open-cast mine left an empty scar in the landscape. As we shall see, this
despoliation is illusory or is a mark of false translation. But again, as in the case
of the translator’s trust, there are genuine borderline cases. Certain texts or
genres have been exhausted by translation. Far more interestingly, others have

188 GEORGE STEINER

been negated by transfiguration, by an act of appropriative penetration and
transfer in excess of the original, more ordered, more aesthetically pleasing.
There are originals we no longer turn to because the translation is of a higher
magnitude (the sonnets of Louise Labé after Rilke’s Umdichtung). I will come
back to this paradox of betrayal by augment.

The third movement is incorporative, in the strong sense of the word. The
import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a
vacuum. The native semantic field is already extant and crowded. There are
innumerable shadings of assimilation and placement of the newly-acquired,
ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness at the core of the kind
which cultural history ascribes to, say, Luther’s Bible or North’s Plutarch, all the
way to the permanent strangeness and marginality of an artifact such as
Nabokov’s “English-language” Onegin. But whatever the degree of
“naturalization”, the act of importation can potentially dislocate or relocate the
whole of the native structure. The Heideggerian “we are what we understand to
be” entails that our own being is modified by each occurrence of comprehensive
appropriation. No language, no traditional symbolic set or cultural ensemble
imports without risk of being transformed. Here two families of metaphor,
probably related, offer themselves, that of sacramental intake or incarnation and
that of infection. The incremental values of communion pivot on the moral,
spiritual state of the recipient. Though all decipherment is aggressive and, at one
level, destructive, there are differences in the motive of appropriation and in the
context of “the bringing back”. Where the native matrix is disoriented or
immature, the importation will not enrich, it will not find a proper locale. It will
generate not an integral response but a wash of mimicry (French neo-classicism
in its north-European, German, and Russian versions). There can be contagions
of facility triggered by the antique or foreign import. After a time, the native
organism will react, endeavouring to neutralize or expel the foreign body. Much
of European romanticism can be seen as a riposte to this sort of infection, as an
attempt to put an embargo on a plethora of foreign, mainly French eighteenth-
century goods. In every pidgin we see an attempt to preserve a zone of native
speech and a failure of that attempt in the face of politically and economically
enforced linguistic invasion. The dialectic of embodiment entails the possibility
that we may be consumed.

This dialectic can be seen at the level of individual sensibility. Acts of translation
add to our means; we come to incarnate alternative energies and resources of
feeling. But we may be mastered and made lame by what we have imported. There
are translators in whom the vein of personal, original creation goes dry. MacKenna
speaks of Plotinus literally submerging his own being. Writers have ceased from
translation, sometimes too late, because the inhaled voice of the foreign text had
come to choke their own. Societies with ancient but eroded epistemologies of ritual
and symbol can be knocked off balance and made to lose belief in their own identity
under the voracious impact of premature or indigestible assimilation. The cargo-
cults of New Guinea, in which the natives worship what airplanes bring in, provide
an uncannily exact, ramified image of the risks of translation.

This is only another way of saying that the hermeneutic motion is dangerously
incomplete, that it is dangerous because it is incomplete, if it lacks its fourth stage,

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION 189

the piston-stroke, as it were, which completes the cycle. The a-prioristic movement
of trust puts us off balance. We “lean towards” the confronting text (every translator
has experienced this palpable bending towards and launching at his target). We
encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again offbalance, having
caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from “the other” and
by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own. The system
is now off-tilt. The hermeneutic act must compensate. If it is to be authentic, it must
mediate into exchange and restored parity.

The enactment of reciprocity in order to restore balance is the crux of the métier
and morals of translation. But it is very difficult to put abstractly. The appropriative
“rapture” of the translator—the word has in it, of course, the root and meaning of
violent transport—leaves the original with a dialectically enigmatic residue.
Unquestionably there is a dimension of loss, of breakage—hence, as we have seen,
the fear of translation, the taboos on revelatory export which hedge sacred texts,
ritual nominations, and formulas in many cultures. But the residue is also, and
decisively, positive. The work translated is enhanced. This is so at a number of
fairly obvious levels. Being methodical, penetrative, analytic, enumerative, the
process of translation, like all modes of focused understanding, will detail, illumine,
and generally body forth its object. The over-determination of the interpretative act
is inherently inflationary: it proclaims that “there is more here than meets the eye”,
that “the accord between content and executive form is closer, more delicate than
had been observed hitherto”. To class a source-text as worth translating is to dignify
it immediately and to involve it in a dynamic of magnification (subject, naturally,
to later review and even, perhaps, dismissal). The motion of transfer and paraphrase
enlarges the stature of the original. Historically, in terms of cultural context, of the
public it can reach, the latter is left more prestigious. But this increase has a more
important, existential perspective. The relations of a text to its translations,
imitations, thematic variants, even parodies, are too diverse to allow of any single
theoretic, definitional scheme. They categorize the entire question of the meaning
of meaning in time, of the existence and effects of the linguistic fact outside its
specific, initial form. But there can be no doubt that echo enriches, that it is more
than shadow and inert simulacrum. We are back at the problem of the mirror
which not only reflects but also generates light. The original text gains from the
orders of diverse relationship and distance established between itself and the
translations. The reciprocity is dialectic: new “formats” of significance are initiated
by distance and by contiguity. Some translations edge us away from the canvas,
others bring us up close.

This is so even where, perhaps especially where, the translation is only partly
adequate. The failings of the translator (I will give common examples) localize,
they project as on to a screen, the resistant vitalities, the opaque centres of specific
genius in the original. Hegel and Heidegger posit that being must engage other
being in order to achieve self-definition. This is true only in part of language which,
at the phonetic and grammatical levels, can function inside its own limits of
diacritical differentiation. But it is pragmatically true of all but the most rudimentary
acts of form and expression. Existence in history, the claim to recognizable identity
(style), are based on relations to other articulate constructs. Of such relations,
translation is the most graphic.

190 GEORGE STEINER

Nevertheless, there is unbalance. The translator has taken too much—he has
padded, embroidered, “read into”—or too little—he has skimped, elided, cut out
awkward corners. There has been an outflow of energy from the source and an
inflow into the receptor altering both and altering the harmonics of the whole
system. Péguy puts the matter of inevitable damage definitively in his critique of
Leconte de Lisle’s translations of Sophocles: “ce que la réalité nous enseigne
impitoyablement et sans aucune exception, c’est que toute opération de cet ordre,
toute opération de déplacement, sans aucune exception, entraîne
impitoyablement et irrévocablement une déperdition, une altération, et que cette
déperdition, cette altération est toujours considérable.”2 Genuine translation will,
therefore, seek to equalize, though the mediating steps may be lengthy and
oblique. Where it falls short of the original, the authentic translation makes the
autonomous virtues of the original more precisely visible (Voss is weak at
characteristic focal points in his Homer, but the lucid honesty of his momentary
lack brings out the appropriate strengths of the Greek). Where it surpasses the
original, the real translation infers that the source-text possesses potentialities,
elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself. This is Schleiermacher’s notion of a
hermeneutic which ‘knows better than the author did” (Paul Celan translating
Apollinaire’s Salomé). The ideal, never accomplished, is one of total counterpart
or re-petition—an asking again—which is not, however, a tautology. No such
perfect “double” exists. But the ideal makes explicit the demand for equity in the
hermeneutic process.

Only in this way, I think, can we assign substantive meaning to the key notion of
“fidelity”. Fidelity is not literalism or any technical device for rendering “spirit”.
The whole formulation, as we have found it over and over again in discussions of
translation, is hopelessly vague. The translator, the exegetist, the reader is faithful
to his text, makes his response responsible, only when he endeavours to restore the
balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has
disrupted. Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense, economic. By virtue of tact,
and tact intensified is moral vision, the translator-interpreter creates a condition of
significant exchange. The arrows of meaning, of cultural, psychological benefaction,
move both ways. There is, ideally, exchange without loss. In this respect, translation
can be pictured as a negation of entropy; order is preserved at both ends of the
cycle, source and receptor. The general model here is that of Lévi-Strauss’s
Anthropologie structurale which regards social structures as attempts at dynamic
equilibrium achieved through an exchange of words, women, and material goods.
All capture calls for subsequent compensation; utterance solicits response, exogamy
and endogamy are mechanisms of equalizing transfer. Within the class of semantic
exchanges, translation is again the most graphic, the most radically equitable. A
translator is accountable to the diachronic and synchronic mobility and conservation
of the energies of meaning. A translation is, more than figuratively, an act of
doubleentry; both formally and morally the books must balance.

This view of translation as a hermeneutic of trust (élancement), of penetration,
of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the sterile triadic
model which has dominated the history and theory of the subject. The perennial
distinction between literalism, paraphrase and free imitation, turns out to be wholly
contingent. It has no precision or philosophic basis. It overlooks the key fact that a

THE HERMENEUTIC MOTION 191

fourfold hermeneia, Aristotle’s term for discourse which signifies because it
interprets, is conceptually and practically inherent in even the rudiments of
translation.

Notes

1 Cf. Paul Ricœur, “Existence et herméneutique” in Le Conflit des interprétations
(Paris, 1969).

2 Charles Péguy, “Les Suppliants parallèles” in Oeuvres en prose 1898–1908
(Paris, 1959), I, p. 890. This analysis of the art of poetic translation first appeared
in December 1905. Cf. Simone Fraisse, Péguy et le monde antique (Paris, 1973),
pp. 146–59.