Translation and its Postcolonial Discontents: Controversy over Toma Seita’s Reading of Kim Soun’s Japanese Translation of Korean Poetry in Postwar Japan

This talk, “Translation and its Postcolonial Discontents,” examines the postcolonial controversy over Japanese leftist historian Toma Seita’s interpretations of Korean poetry, which Korean writer Kim Soun translated into Japanese during the colonial period. In his 1954 essays, Toma read into the poems an allegory of the Korean nation’s suffering under Japanese rule. However, Kim denounced Toma’s politicization of the lyrical poems because, in Kim’s view, Toma misrepresented the poems and Korean culture by relying on Kim’s own Japanese translations. 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, the lecturer explores the controversy’s potential for encouraging a just relationship between the former colonized and colonizers.

Lecturer information: Serk-Bae Suh is currently an Assistant Professor in the East Asian Languages and Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include modern Korean and Japanese literature, modern Korean and Japanese intellectual history, and colonial and postcolonial studies. His current research examines the role of translation in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse from the 1910s through the 1960s.

Sponsored by the Center for Korean Research.