“A Nothingness Capable of Damage”: Translating Trauma and Reading Alterity in The Foreign Student

Abstract

This essay examines both the practice of translation and the trope of it as they are represented and reproduced by Susan Choi`s The Foreign Student. Chang and Katherine, the two protagonists of the novel, succeed in redefining each other outside the limiting social categorization and in relation to each other. This is made possible not because they identify with each other, but because they appreciate and respond to the complete Otherness each poses to the other. I argue that this relation is modeled after translation where languages touch without merging. The disruptive potential of such an ethical communication paradigm is realized inside the novel, through Chang`s translation, and also on the level of the narrative, as it is presented as a(n incomplete) translation of Chang`s story.