Anxiety of words, alliance of mirrors (Korea, Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hye-sun, Yi Yon-ju)

The dissertation is divided into two sections: an anthology of translations of poetry by contemporary Korean women and a critical introduction.; The creative portion of my dissertation consists of my translations of poems by Ch'oe Sŭng-ja (1952– ), Kim Hye-sun (1955– ), and Yi Yo˘n-ju (1953–1992). These poems mark a critical development in contemporary Korean women's poetry; the three poets have all departed from the conventional “gentle” and “pretty” poetry associated with “female poet” (yo˘ryu siin) by asserting their feminist awareness of Korean women's lives and their use of innovative poetic conventions. The contexts from which their poetry emerges include the intensely repressive military dictatorships of South Korea, supported by the United States during the 1970s and 80s and the Korean women's movement of the 1980s that opposed the military rules and struggled for gender and class liberation.; The critical introduction is made up of three chapters that explore the literary and historical contexts of contemporary Korean women's poetry and the politics of translation. In the first chapter, I emphasize Korean women's literary traditions and the social and historical relevance of Korean women's literature. I trace the emergence of twentieth-century Korean women's poetry in the context of the Korean women's movement of the 1920s and 30s and the more recent developments in the Korean women's movement of the 1970s to 1990s. In the last two chapters, I explore the personal, cultural, and political dimensions of the translation of Korean women's poetry by using anti-colonial/post-colonial and feminist theories by critics such as Frantz Fanon, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Edward Said. I argue that in the context of unequal power relations between South Korea and the United States, the translation of Korean women's poetry is a form of political resistance. I stress that when I perform a translation act with full awareness of the cultural and political subtexts of Korean women's poetry, including awareness of my own historical location, I am able to create narratives of resistance that give voice to Korean women's condition under neocolonialism.