Kafka in Korea: A Case Study for Diversifying Modern Languages

About the Project

While numbers of students of German at British universities fell by 30% in the last decade, Korean saw an increase of 300%. In response, University Council of Modern Languages called for a transformation of the discipline by diversifying the research and teaching landscape. This project, conducted by Dr Karolina Watroba with funding from the British Academy, addressed this call through a case study on the wide-ranging creative reception of the landmark German modernist writer Franz Kafka in contemporary Korean culture to investigate how literary brands such as the ‘Kafkaesque’ and the ‘Korean Wave’ interact. You can read more about the project here.

Syllabus for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation

In February 2024, Dr Watroba gave a lecture and seminar for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford. The goal was to enrich and diversify the curriculum by inviting students to engage with literary texts from Korea and theoretical debates that emerge when these texts reach the English-speaking world in translation. This included discussing translation practices and theories of the Korean writers themselves, such as Bae Suah, a prominent writer who is also one of Kafka's Korean translators. An abstract and slides for the lecture, as well as an annotated reading list for the seminar are included below. If you teach or study similar topics, you can use these materials to introduce this Korean-English-German case study into your own research or teaching.

Mistranslation? A View from Reception Studies

This class applies the methodology of reception studies—the study of readers and reading—to a much-discussed but thorny question of mistranslation. It both considers translation as a form of reading and analyse how various readers approach translated fiction. The syllabus draws on the work of two contemporary, prize-winning Korean woman writers, Han Kang and Bae Suah, and their English translators, Deborah Smith and Sora Kim-Russell. The critical debates on mistranslation prompted by the award of the Man Booker International Prize to Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in 2016 are contrasted with Bae Suah’s discussion of her own theory and practice of translation from German into Korean. In this way, the class examines ideas of interpretation, fidelity, and creativity in reading and translation practices; the unequal distribution of cultural capital along the lines of gender, nationality, race, and class; and the role of trends and financial pressures on the global literary market. View the slides for this class here.

Preparation for the Seminar

In the seminar, we critically analyse cultural discourses on reading, translation, and mistranslation using five short essays and interviews with Han Kang, Bae Suah, Deborah Smith, and Sora Kim-Russell as case studies. All participants should read the focus texts. If you are giving a presentation this week, please prepare a 7 to 10-minute talk that considers EITHER how the conceptions of mistranslation explored in the readings and in the lecture intersect with your own research and academic interests OR how the insights afforded by the further reading for this week can be used to contextualise our focus texts.  

Focus Texts

Optional Further Reading

  • Cheong Ho-Jeong, Lim Hyun-Kyung, and Jeon Min-Chul , ‘Changes in Korea’s Outbound Literary Translation: Who, How, and Why?’, INContext: Studies in Translation and Interculturalism, 1.1 (2021), 6-36. Article based on a focus group discussion of the theory and practice of literary translation, showcasing views of different stakeholders: translators, grant-making bodies, literary agents, and translation studies researchers.
  • Sun Kyoung Yoon, ‘Fidelity or infidelity? The Mistranslation Controversy Over The Vegetarian’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 35.2 (2023), 242-261. Summary of the debates about the quality of Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in the context of competing theories of translation.
  • Jenny Wang Medina, ‘At the Gates of Babel: The Globalization of Korean Literature as World Literature’, Acta Koreana, 21.2 (2018), 395-422. Analysis of the activities of the Korean Literature Translation Institute, drawing on theories of world literature, the uneven distribution of cultural capital, and national politics of globalization.
  • Anton Hur, ‘The Mythical English Reader’, in Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (eds.), Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2022). Personal essay by a prominent translator from Korean, written from the perspective of postcolonial and critical race theory.
  • ‘Generation TF: Who Is Really Reading Translated Fiction in the UK’, The Booker Prizes (13 April 2023). Recent quantitative report on readers of translated fiction in the UK, commissioned by the Booker Prize Foundation.
  • Ika Willis, Reception (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Concise and readable introduction to the field of reception studies, which considers its diverse roots in biblical scholarship, classics, literary theory, cultural studies, and translation.
  • Han Kang, The Vegetarian, trans. Deborah Smith (London: Portobello, 2015).
  • Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found, trans. Sora Kim-Russell (Seattle: AmazonCrossing, 2015).
  • Bae Suah, A Greater Music, trans. Deborah Smith (Rochester: Open Letter, 2016).

Acknowledgements

Dr Karolina Watroba is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She works on modern literature, film, and culture across several languages, with a focus on German, English, Polish, and more recently Korean. She is the author of Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading (Oxford: OUP, 2022). Her new book Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (London: Profile, 2024) is an unconventional biography which tells Kafka’s story through the stories of his readers around the world, focusing on Oxford, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem, and Seoul. She developed one strand of this project, ‘Kafka in Korea: A Case Study for Diversifying Modern Languages’, as a recipient of a British Academy Talent Development Award 2022-23 [TDA22\220037], and would like to acknowledge this support in the creation of this syllabus.

If you use this syllabus, I’d love to hear from you!