Submit THREE questions and explanations in total. 

1-2 pages, double-spaced, Time New Roman 12

Reading: Suh (chapter 4)

After you read the readings, come up with 3 questions on your own.

You are required to formulate questions in the way in which they address the main points of the assigned texts and the questions should demonstrate that you have read the readings. For each question, you are also required to provide an explanation of why the main idea of the readings is important. 

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 translation: tōma’s interpretations
of korean poetry and kim’s refutation

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.

grave of an unknown 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.

無縁塚

北門の
道の傍(かたへ)に草生える
無縁佛の
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
無縁佛の塚ありて
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.”

what good is it to long for my hometown?

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
血縁(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).

hometown

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 grave 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.

encountering 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.