Translating Korean Comfort Women: Narrative Strategies for Kim Soom’s One Left
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The “comfort women” issue is one of the most contentious and emotionally charged disputes between South Korea and Japan. Its political sensitivity is so acute that it has often been treated as a taboo subject, even within the field of Korean literature. In this study, I analyze the English translation of Han myŏng (One Left), the 2016 Korean novel devoted to the subject of comfort women by Kim Sum (Kim Soom). This work is unique in that it is based on testimonies from surviving comfort women and contains over 300 endnotes citing the sources of the testimonies. My analysis explores how the translation captures the experiences and memories of the victims. Specifically, I focus on eight key aspects: (1) the creation of a temporary shift in the narrator’s voice, (2) the complexities of thought representation, (3) the use of different spelling, (4) how the translation conveys expressive meaning, (5) the adoption of the generic “you,” (6) the metaphor of comfort women as consumables, (7) the clarification of cultural subtext for the reader, and (8) the endnotes. Following this analysis, I examine the omission of an episode from the translation—an authorial choice that could be misinterpreted as an unfaithful rendering of the original. My analysis suggests that the narrative surrounding comfort women can be expanded and refined through translation.
Abstract
The “comfort women” issue is one of the most contentious and emotionally charged disputes between South Korea and Japan. Its political sensitivity is so acute that it has often been treated as a taboo subject, even within the field of Korean literature. In this study, I analyze the English translation of Han myŏng (One Left), the 2016 Korean novel devoted to the subject of comfort women by Kim Sum (Kim Soom). This work is unique in that it is based on testimonies from surviving comfort women and contains over 300 endnotes citing the sources of the testimonies. My analysis explores how the translation captures the experiences and memories of the victims. Specifically, I focus on eight key aspects: (1) the creation of a temporary shift in the narrator’s voice, (2) the complexities of thought representation, (3) the use of different spelling, (4) how the translation conveys expressive meaning, (5) the adoption of the generic “you,” (6) the metaphor of comfort women as consumables, (7) the clarification of cultural subtext for the reader, and (8) the endnotes. Following this analysis, I examine the omission of an episode from the translation—an authorial choice that could be misinterpreted as an unfaithful rendering of the original. My analysis suggests that the narrative surrounding comfort women can be expanded and refined through translation.