The Newest Original for the Farthest Origin: Postcolonial Korea’s Discourse of Loss and Modern Translation

The Korean native writing system han’gŭl was invented in the mid-fifteenth century but only became standardized in the early twentieth-century under Japanese colonial rule. Because it was opposed to the national language of the colonizer, han’gŭl became the ideated mother tongue and was imagined as a natural language that carried the inherent value of the Korean people. As the status of han’gŭl shifted from the vernacular script (ŏnmun) of colonial Chosŏn to the official script of the newly-established national language in postcolonial Korea, a series of language movements, such as the Regaining Our Language movement (urimal toro ch’atki undong) and the Purification of National Language movement (kugŏ sunhwa undong), made possible the illusion of a sovereign self that is original and offers itself up to be redeemed. In this talk, I examine how the discourse of loss that is constructed during this transition demands repetitive rewritings of the original that internalizes the loss in postcolonial Korea. Translation was employed as a discursive device during this time. Translation of classics that are typically written in literary Chinese (hanmun) into contemporary han’gŭl became a national task, and it is still quite common to translate early modern texts as well as more recent past publications that mix Chinese characters (hancha) exclusively into han’gŭl. Confronting the elusive image of origin here, I argue that the rewritings of postcolonial writers in Korea contest the illusory discourse of loss precisely through the paradox of the multiplicated originals and translation as repetition.   

Yoon Jeong Oh is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Translingual Interventions: The Melancholic Other of Japanese Colonialism, Postcolonial Korea, and Transpacific Cosmopolitanism, which engages with translation theories, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies to investigate the notion of singularity in translingual and transmedial practices of diasporic writers. Her writings appear in Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming), Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Cultures, Journal of Korean and Asian Arts, PAJLS, and Soft Power of the Korean Wave, among others. Her research interests also include urban studies, visual studies, and the links between text, media, and culture.