Translating Korean American Life: Suki Kim’s The Interpreter
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The paper examines Korean American writer, Suki Kim’s debut novel, The Interpreter. In the novel, Kim presents tragic dissolution of a Korean American’s family. Interestingly, the family’s struggle and tragic breakdown is closely linked to their unaccomplished tasks of translating differences between Korean and American languages and culture. The paper analyzes how the immigrant parents’ linguistic isolation triggers tragic social, economic, and cultural marginalization of the Korean American family. Besides, the parents’ nostalgia for the lost home country and the resulting inability to come to terms with multi-cultural America makes the parents fail in becoming reliable cultural translator for their Korean American daughters, Suzy and Grace Park. The daughters, thus, fails to bridge the gap between their isolated Korean home and mainstream American culture they face outside their home. By depicting three characters’ failures in their tasks of translating between Korean and American languages and culture, Suki Kim successfully problematizes the imbalance of power existing between Korean and American side of the hyphenated identity of Korean Americans. The paper examines these problematizations and the following hope of creating new de-hyphenated Korean American identity presented in the text.
Abstract
The paper examines Korean American writer, Suki Kim’s debut novel, The Interpreter. In the novel, Kim presents tragic dissolution of a Korean American’s family. Interestingly, the family’s struggle and tragic breakdown is closely linked to their unaccomplished tasks of translating differences between Korean and American languages and culture. The paper analyzes how the immigrant parents’ linguistic isolation triggers tragic social, economic, and cultural marginalization of the Korean American family. Besides, the parents’ nostalgia for the lost home country and the resulting inability to come to terms with multi-cultural America makes the parents fail in becoming reliable cultural translator for their Korean American daughters, Suzy and Grace Park. The daughters, thus, fails to bridge the gap between their isolated Korean home and mainstream American culture they face outside their home. By depicting three characters’ failures in their tasks of translating between Korean and American languages and culture, Suki Kim successfully problematizes the imbalance of power existing between Korean and American side of the hyphenated identity of Korean Americans. The paper examines these problematizations and the following hope of creating new de-hyphenated Korean American identity presented in the text.
참고문헌 (8)
- Dwyer, June, "Speaking and Listening: The Immigrant as Spy Comes in from the Cold, In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature", pp.73~82 (1999), Greenwood P
- "English Only Law" (2010)[URL]
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- Gouanvic, Jean-marc, "egitimacy, Marronnage and the Power of Translation, In Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era" (2000), U of Ottawa P
- Kim, Suki, "The Interpreter" (2003), Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Kristeva, Julia, "Strangers to Ourselves" (1994), Columbia
- Li, Leiwei David, "magining the Nation., In Imagining the Nation", pp.1~17 (1998), Standford UP
- Liu, Lydia H, "The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign, In Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulation" (1999), Duke UP