The figure of the translator

Kim Saryang was a Korean author who wrote in between the colonial periphery of Korea and the metropolitan center of Japan and who served as a war correspondent during the subsequent onset of the Cold War during the Korean War. Although he was an instrumental figure during the post-1945 transition from the colonial era to its postcolonial Cold War aftermath in Northeast Asia, he has been marginalized in the region’s variously divided national literary fields until recently. This chapter examines the ubiquitous but failed figure of the translator who appears in both the life and the works of Kim as an entrance into examining long-standing historical and historiographical divides.