Unfolding Time: Translation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE

Abstract

[eng] The impact of the Japanese invasion at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent civil war seriously disrupted the Korean population. The sense of displacement caused by the perpetuation of imperialist practices continued to affect the following generations, particularly in the context of the Korean diaspora. In DICTEE (1982), the Korean-American writer and film artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha relates her own nomadic experience in this context through an experimental language of superposition of styles, voices and deconstructive devices to recount the contemporary history of Korea against discourses of power. This dissertation examines the division of time as a non-linear process, in opposition to official accounts of history, and how multiple temporalities can be applied to some of the examples of translation in Cha’s work. To this end, it is argued that the heterogeneous temporalities developed by Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze in connection with Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory can shed light on the author’s historical approach and the reconstitution of identity in the context of traumatic history. While Cha addresses several political and personal issues simultaneously, this dissertation focuses mainly on those aspects that present multiple degrees of time in the deconstruction of history as a linear ontology, and how these interrelate with translation understood as a temporal practice.