North Korea’s Translation of Anne Frank and the Politics of Self-Writing

Abstract:The Diary of Anne Frank was published in North Korea in 2002. Coming in the wake of a devastating famine, the decision to translate this text was likely driven by the need to provide North Korea’s youth with a model of resilience. To appreciate the translator’s interventions, I provide a close reading of the translation and contextualize it historically, and make two assertions. First, that it is productive to understand the diary within North Korea’s writing practices and theories of good literature and translation. Second, I argue that self-writing is less a spontaneous delivery of the true self and more one that is processed through a web of linguistic and social structures, and I offer a consideration of the “politics of self-writing” as a methodological approach. In addition, I show how reception of the diary demonstrates the difficulty of restricting its interpretation, even in North Korea.