Cultural Translation and World Literature in Korea

The aesthetics and the ethics of cultural translation create the proper distancing as well as the free linguistic displacement based upon mutual respect and equivalence in every aspect. T. S. Eliot's fragments in the last section of The Waste Land, entitled "What the Thunder Said," demonstrates such a case of cultural translation. The purpose of this case of cultural translation has been to provide a rationale for the context of the present Korean comparative literary studies. What cultural translation can do is to let the readers understand the foreign cultures and literatures that appear to be untranslatable, by engaging dynamically with the newness and the strangeness, as well as by encountering transcultural initiation beyond the monocultural closure, as Gayatri Spivak clarified in her discussion of "supplementing" in terms of figuring out "the exact shape of a place that is empty in what is to be supplemented, zooming out, but not in competition with zooming in." From these double perspectives of "cultural translation" and "glocalization" as well as the dynamic interplay of comparative, world literature, and translation studies in a convergent way, world literature studies beyond comparative literature as a discipline in Korea has witnessed a drastic change for the last decade. The conference themes and articles in the journals of the associations in collectivity demonstrate the phenomenon of a new wave of comparative literature in the form of world literature.