Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s by Serk-Bae Suh (review)

Serk-Bae Suh’s Treacherous Translation is a marvelously rich, thought-provoking study of translation between Korean and Japanese from the 1910s to the 1960s—that is, through the colonial period and beyond—that combines high-level theory and specific textual examples to explore how language functions in the creation and maintenance of colonial structures. Each chapter comprises a separate, carefully contextualized case study that highlights a particular problematic in the consideration of translation, colonialism, and postcolonialism. The argument is exemplary in its clarity and sophistication and in its ability to smoothly meld complex political philosophy and close textual analysis—a tour de force.

Suh’s preface performs the function usually associated with an introduction, laying out the main research questions and the theoretical underpinnings of the book. It opens with an admirably clear statement of the author’s main thesis:

This 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, . . . 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.

(p. xiii)

Suh bases his re-theorizing of translation largely on the work of Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and provides a detailed explanation for why he does so. I will mention here only the two main features of Levinasian thought that Suh discusses in this connection. First, “Levinas’s ethics is premised on the radical alterity of the other. 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. The self should not and cannot speak, think, or behave on behalf of the other” (p. xix). Since colonialism is a “mode of rule that prevents the self from encountering the alterity of the other” (p. xix), its unethical nature becomes all the more clear when viewed through the lens of Levinas.

Second, recent trends in colonial and postcolonial studies, such as the work of Homi Bhabha, emphasize colonial ambivalence and the blurring of the difference between colonizer and colonized. In contrast to that view, Suh contends that “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” (p. xx). Levinasian philosophy allows for the difference between the two to be maintained, without essentializing either.

The preface is followed by an introductory essay titled “Translation and the Colonial Desire for Transparency,” which examines colonial-period stories by Japanese and Korean writers of fiction. Through an examination of five texts, Suh underscores the materiality of language, highlighted through translation, which frustrates the typical desire of the translator—that is, to take the meaning of a locution in one language and render it transparently in another. The very difference between languages that makes translation necessary also makes perfect translation impossible. Moreover, in the colonial context, where language and power are deeply intertwined, the role of the translator is both crucially important and liable to suspicion.

In a 1923 story by Japanese author Nakajima Atsushi, for example, the protagonist Cho Kyoyŏng is a Korean officer in the Japanese colonial police whose job is to translate Japanese-language commands and laws into Korean. He is, unsurprisingly, viewed unfavorably by the colonized Koreans as the voice of oppression, but is also distrusted by the Japanese, who suspect his loyalties may be divided. Cho is eventually fired and ends up roaming the streets, a victim of the impossible pressures of the colonial translator.

In order to emphasize the relationship between translation and colonial domination, Suh cites Roman Jakobsen and Jacques Derrida on...