Song of Ariran and the Question of Translation

Song of Ariran and the Question of Translation

A quasi-autobiographical text recounting the lifelong journey of a Korean revolutionarynamed Kim San (a.k.a. Jang Jirak), Song of Ariran(1941) remains a unique work offering an intimate view of the incessant political strife into which East Asia was thrown in the early twentieth century. The textstands out from many hagiographic works of its genrethrough the way that its narrator casts his political peregrination—one that takes in nationalism, anarchism,and communism—under athematic rubric of compulsive failure. One outcome of this avowal of failure is an aporetic logic of narrativity, whereby the text is structured around a desire to investmeaning inexperiences that consistently resist suchsignification. Butthe theme of failure inSong of Ariranextends beyond its probing of the problematicboundaryof life and writing. For in acceding to the offer of a joint literary project with the American journalist Nym Wales (a.k.a. Helen Foster Snow) in the foreign medium of English language, Kim San in effect raisedthe question of failure to the text’s formal level by problematizing the idea of translation as aderivative form of linguistic communication. By drawing on Naoki Sakai’s theoretical formulationof translation as “heterolingual address,”my article attemptsto show that the significance of a text like Song of Ariranfor our timeliesnot so much in the moralorpsychological dimension of its textual contentasinits positing of the possibility of a special form of literary readership, which Kim San enacts via the traces of incommensurabilityarising from his collaborative encounter with his American writing partner.