A House Divided: Translation, National Identity, and the Rise of Pluricentric Korean

The geopolitical division of the Korean Peninsula in 1945 also resulted in the rupture of many colonial-era (1910-1945) cultural movements, among them the Korean language reform movement headed by the Han’gŭl Society (Han’gŭl hakhoe). Many of the members of this influential society “went North” after 1945, contributing to an emergent North Korean language policy and planning regime that increasingly diverged from its South Korean counterpart. In this talk, I will demonstrate how the bifurcation of the Korean language movement and the development of disparate state ideologies in the Koreas eventually became established approaches to not only language and literature, but also the interpretation of pre-modern Korean history and its relationship to contemporary politics and national legitimacy. As a case study to demonstrate this divergence in the realm of literature, I examine two translations of The Tale of Unyŏng (Unyŏng chŏn 雲英傳, early seventeenth century) into vernacular Korean in South Korea (1960) and North Korea (1966). Looking beyond the classical paradigm of interlingual and intralingual translation as “translation proper” and “rewording,” respectively, I argue that translations of classical Korean fiction from Literary Sinitic (Hanmun) into vernacular Korean represented a form of transitional intralingual translation as each nation navigated away from active membership in the Sinographic Cosmopolis (Hanchakwŏn 漢字圈) and attempted to establish a new national literature and cultural identity.

Bio: Daniel Pieper is the Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies and the Director of Korean Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Korea. His forthcoming book (University of Toronto Press) is titled Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korea.