By Matt VanVolkenburg
In a July 26, 1970, Korea Times column titled "Our own culture," university student Ahn Young-ha wrote of the "influx of excessive Western culture" and complained of the deterioration of Koreans' "wholesome folk spirit." The solution, he said, was to "try hard to build more inner strength with pride in our nation and self-confidence as Koreans. In order to do this, we must try to have subjectivity to evaluate our culture first before imitating others."
An American columnist with the paper also saw the word "subjectivity" used a week later to glowingly describe a new Korean history book. Confused by such praise, when asked what the virtues of subjectivity were, he was told "that author had an independent attitude, free of the old manner of regarding Korean history." To this columnist, however, that was not what "subjectivity" meant, since in the West the term was the disparaging opposite of "objectivity" and referred to a person's prejudice.
In an Aug. 7 letter to the editor, Lee Kyung-shik cleared up the confusion by explaining that "jucheseong" was often mistranslated as "subjectivity," which has a different meaning in English. Thus "This book of Korean history is based on jucheseong" had the connotation instead that the author "refused to follow blindly the Japanese colonial view of Korean history." He ended his letter by wondering if there was a better translation into English of "jucheseong."
Because "juche" meant "main body" (or "subject") and "jucheseong" meant "the quality of being the main body," the term was not easy to translate. As the author of an Aug. 30 article titled "Coined word causes problems in translation," Han Nae-bok remembered that "the root word juche came into vogue for the first time during the initial days of the May 16, 1961, military revolution." The military officers who staged the coup called themselves "Hyeongmyeong Juche Seryeok," or "the main body of the revolutionary force," which, he said, was better translated in the English-language press as "the revolutionary mainstream."
When the generals began to emphasize that "Koreans must have minjokjeok jucheseong," he found himself at a loss as to how to translate it. A direct translation like "the quality of being the main nationalistic body" was nonsensical. The first time he saw the term "national subjectivity" as a translation, he struggled to come up with something better, ultimately settling on "a spirit of national independence" or "national identity." He was still unsatisfied. He also felt the original Korean term "smacked of chauvinism, and even of xenophobia." Despite this, he noted that the term "had much appeal to the general public _ at least to the Korean press," and that he himself once impulsively used "jucheseong" in a way that he retrospectively realized meant "independent." He later discovered that in English "subjective" has another meaning, in an active, Marxist sense ("the proletariat is the subject of the revolution"), and was forced to use the term "national subjectivity" when translating an article.
On Sept. 5, 1970, author Chu Yohan wrote a letter clarifying the meaning. "In most cases it is used as an antonym for the subservient attitude to Chinese culture in olden times and towards Western or Japanese in recent years." If one were to search the dictionary after the word "self," he suggested, expressions like "self-confidence" or "self-consciousness" might be suitable. Or, he offered, "why not use just "jucheseong" as it is?"
To be sure, that is what North Korea has done with the term "juche," though the academic B.R. Myers has argued this was done with the intent to obscure rather than reveal. As can be seen from the above articles, however, the term "jucheseong" was commonly used in the South in the 1960s ― perhaps even more than "juche" was in the North.
In a July 26, 1970, Korea Times column titled "Our own culture," university student Ahn Young-ha wrote of the "influx of excessive Western culture" and complained of the deterioration of Koreans' "wholesome folk spirit." The solution, he said, was to "try hard to build more inner strength with pride in our nation and self-confidence as Koreans. In order to do this, we must try to have subjectivity to evaluate our culture first before imitating others."
An American columnist with the paper also saw the word "subjectivity" used a week later to glowingly describe a new Korean history book. Confused by such praise, when asked what the virtues of subjectivity were, he was told "that author had an independent attitude, free of the old manner of regarding Korean history." To this columnist, however, that was not what "subjectivity" meant, since in the West the term was the disparaging opposite of "objectivity" and referred to a person's prejudice.
In an Aug. 7 letter to the editor, Lee Kyung-shik cleared up the confusion by explaining that "jucheseong" was often mistranslated as "subjectivity," which has a different meaning in English. Thus "This book of Korean history is based on jucheseong" had the connotation instead that the author "refused to follow blindly the Japanese colonial view of Korean history." He ended his letter by wondering if there was a better translation into English of "jucheseong."
Because "juche" meant "main body" (or "subject") and "jucheseong" meant "the quality of being the main body," the term was not easy to translate. As the author of an Aug. 30 article titled "Coined word causes problems in translation," Han Nae-bok remembered that "the root word juche came into vogue for the first time during the initial days of the May 16, 1961, military revolution." The military officers who staged the coup called themselves "Hyeongmyeong Juche Seryeok," or "the main body of the revolutionary force," which, he said, was better translated in the English-language press as "the revolutionary mainstream."
When the generals began to emphasize that "Koreans must have minjokjeok jucheseong," he found himself at a loss as to how to translate it. A direct translation like "the quality of being the main nationalistic body" was nonsensical. The first time he saw the term "national subjectivity" as a translation, he struggled to come up with something better, ultimately settling on "a spirit of national independence" or "national identity." He was still unsatisfied. He also felt the original Korean term "smacked of chauvinism, and even of xenophobia." Despite this, he noted that the term "had much appeal to the general public _ at least to the Korean press," and that he himself once impulsively used "jucheseong" in a way that he retrospectively realized meant "independent." He later discovered that in English "subjective" has another meaning, in an active, Marxist sense ("the proletariat is the subject of the revolution"), and was forced to use the term "national subjectivity" when translating an article.
On Sept. 5, 1970, author Chu Yohan wrote a letter clarifying the meaning. "In most cases it is used as an antonym for the subservient attitude to Chinese culture in olden times and towards Western or Japanese in recent years." If one were to search the dictionary after the word "self," he suggested, expressions like "self-confidence" or "self-consciousness" might be suitable. Or, he offered, "why not use just "jucheseong" as it is?"
To be sure, that is what North Korea has done with the term "juche," though the academic B.R. Myers has argued this was done with the intent to obscure rather than reveal. As can be seen from the above articles, however, the term "jucheseong" was commonly used in the South in the 1960s ― perhaps even more than "juche" was in the North.
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