Literature is the window to a culture. However, there are concepts and ideas that may be untranslatable because they are unique to that culture. In such a case, what does a translator do? This is the basis of the four papers, written by Prof. Youngmin Kim from Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea, that looks at the impact of translated literature at local and global levels and the challenges experienced by translators when they encounter ‘untranslatable’ material.

When translated from the language it was originally written in, literature transcends the boundaries between nations and cultures, creating transnational world literature. Sometimes these bridges become passages that help create something new. Prof. Kim’s papers on transnational literature collectively reflect upon the phenomena of connecting the dots between other works of literature and cultures, and the attempts to articulate the sense of ‘strangeness’ one encounters when discussing world literature, which then transforms into an exchange of ideas between the cultures creating a “World Republic of Letters”.

However, when one is involved in translating, there are often multiple occasions when one finds it difficult to translate a particular word, sentences, a paragraph, or a series of statements. It is a basic assumption of cultural translation that what appears to be initially untranslatable because of cultural differences can be overcome if the translator becomes attentive to the nuances and the other’s voices, and challenges the cross-cultural venture beyond the space of untranslatability. In order to convey accurate meaning, the translating process needs the translator to feel and endure the original text. Thus, the core question is: How can a translator approach a literary text with the concepts of the familiar and that of the foreign while attempting a faithful translation of literary texts?

Prof. Kim suggests an interactive map of world literature studies. In his papers, he has demonstrated how the very concepts of ‘scale’ and ‘distance’ are related to the literary landscape, and how this helps in mapping the scale of the politics of representation. He believes that “Glocalization” is a convenient theoretical lens with which one can view this world. According to Prof. Kim “Glocalization is a double movement of the up-scale and down-scale: the simultaneous and contested shift up-scale towards the global and down-scale to the local in response to ever-changing economic, political and cultural pressures”. He calls this the ‘poetics of scale’. The rationale for this poetics of scale comes from the poetics of “cultural translation” in world literature.