A Distant Reading of Khamphun Bunthawi’s Luk Isan (A Child of the Northeast) as World Literature

Abstract

This article offers a distant reading of Khamphun Bunthawi’s Luk Isan (A Child of the Northeast) as world literature. By attending to its production, circulation, translation, and reception in an interlocking literary system, it shows that the novel borrows the bildungsroman form from an American children’s novel. This borrowing underlines the role of translated literature and editors in establishing a profoundly unequal relationship between the Western core and peripheral literatures. This article also examines the English translation of Luk Isan. It argues that while the translation creates an intertext that aids Anglophone audiences in comprehending the novel’s foreignness, it fails to convey the linguistic complexity of the novel characterized by the author’s use of central Thai and the Isan dialect. The translation consequently erases the traces of the novel’s bilingualism, which indicates a compromise between the author’s Isan literary repertoire and the Thai readership’s demand for the use of standard Thai. The article ends with the reception of Khamphun’s speech at a literary conference in Germany. Despite Khamphun’s appeal to the Goethean humanist ideal of world literature, the Western audience tended to regard his work as exotic, hence relegating it from world literature.