| Abstract
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This paper explores the complexity of translation of borderland literature through a case study of the Japanese and Chinese translations of the Korean short story “The Red Hill.” Written by the renowned Korean writer Kim Tong-in (김동인, 1900–1951) in 1932, this story features the Korean agrarian community in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria and is conventionally considered a masterpiece of Korean national literature. When it was translated into Japanese and Chinese and anthologized in inland Japan and the Japanese Manchukuo respectively, the three texts of the same story in three languages conveyed different and contradictory national/imperial claims over Manchuria, a Northeast Asian frontier. This case study demonstrates how the very act of translating and anthologizing, as a process of linguistic transposition across cultural and national constituencies, may crystallize the sense of territorial competition through revealing, reshuffling, and redefining the covert intricacy of national relations in the original text. This paper explores the complexity of translation of borderland literature through a case study of the Japanese and Chinese translations of the Korean short story “The Red Hill.” Written by the renowned Korean writer Kim Tong-in (김동인, 1900–1951) in 1932, this story features the Korean agrarian community in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria and is conventionally considered a masterpiece of Korean national literature. When it was translated into Japanese and Chinese and anthologized in inland Japan and the Japanese Manchukuo respectively, the three texts of the same story in three languages conveyed different and contradictory national/imperial claims over Manchuria, a Northeast Asian frontier. This case study demonstrates how the very act of translating and anthologizing, as a process of linguistic transposition across cultural and national constituencies, may crystallize the sense of territorial competition through revealing, reshuffling, and redefining the covert intricacy of national relations in the original text.
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