Reading Response + Ted Goosen (Soren Chang)

 I really enjoyed Ted Goosen's talk on Friday--I think I was hesitant going in because I found during our discussion on Monday that I didn't agree with many of his translation decisions going in, and he seemed to occupy a strange space between domesticization and exocitization, where it felt like he would do both in certain, little translation decisions here and there. During the talk, I feel as though he redeemed himself to me--the distinction between westernization and modernization and how important that is to realize in translations into English really struck me, as well as his whole section on voice and cadence. 

The reading was admittedly tough, but I found Wood's reviews interesting. His article on Nights of Plague touched on revolutionary nostalgia and the longing for an unmodernized, "pure" and "unmarred" culture and cultural experience, which seems aligned with the desire many have to know a translated work as it originally was, in its native language, culturally pure and unfiltered.  I would also like to read The Wall--Wood's review of the tale as a borderline philosophical one centered around the self, as a novel examining one woman's journey from society into solitary within nature in a twisted, reverse Adam and Eve story, and the author's close ties to revolutionary speak against Austrian fascism are a relationship I am eager to explore. 

For my example of translation in my native language I picked an LA Times article on Han Kang's Vegetarian and the abhorrent translation that Deborah Smith created--not abhorrent just because it's bad, but because it's entirely an act of self-service. The article touches on how the translation is so different the original can hardly claim the praise it received internationally. People were shocked when Deborah Smith first translated The Vegetarian because she had only been studying Korean for roughly six years. Last week, Professor Wuerthner told me and Gisele that the reason she had jumped into the language so quickly was because she had a sort of fantasy lined up for her--she wanted to be the first, or the best, to translate an "untranslated" language--a fetishized approach to translation. The LA Times notes it's an incredibly poeticized translation, with very little stylistic resemblance to Han Kang's original. No wonder people call Smith's translation a complete betrayal of the original.