Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature

Abstract

Non-Western literatures, no matter whether we call them literatures of the Global South or literatures of the Three Continents, have been constituted in the process of fighting for legitimacy within the Western literary model. For this reason, scholarship on non-Western literatures necessarily entails postcolonial projects. Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature explores colonized Korean writers' translations as a deliberate, constructive practice for tackling their specific colonial situations, and conducts its own postcolonial project in the sense that it confronts colonial negotiations in the birth of modern Korean literature without nationalist embellishments. Translation's Forgotten History is the first work to shed light on the significant relations between Korean and Russian literature via Japanese mediation in the formative period of modern Korean literature. Korean modernity, as is well known, emerged simultaneously with Japanese colonial rule, and thus our understandings of Korean modernity always walk the delicate line between colonial repercussions and national impetus. However, the influence of Russian literature in the colonial modern period has not received due attention, which Heekyoung Cho demonstrates in this book, for various reasons including the linguistic barrier of the Russian language. With excellent language proficiencies and a sophisticated and meticulous approach to the original texts, Cho examines the selective reception and transformation of Russian literature within the context of a burgeoning Korean literature, which in many cases merely followed Japanese iterations but often, and more importantly, verged along a different interpretive path by intertwining with Korea's particular colonized circumstances. By doing so, Translation's Forgotten History successfully demonstrates the ways in which colonized Korean writers projected their desire for and purpose in creating a new literature and an active role for writers through the process of translating Russian literature. The book redefines the practice of translation in Korean literature as a “creative impetus” (108) and as “a constituent force of modern literature” (27)—which was previously neglected or forgotten as an immature or secondary literary act. Through the “productive appropriation” of noted foreign literature, local actors could formulate and articulate their thoughts in the formative modern era. Arguing for translation's “constituent force,” Cho leads the reader to reconsider existing arguments that assume the immaturity or inferiority of latecomer literature in translation or influence studies. She places more significance on the deliberate choices and appropriations of local writers than on the origins, influences, and hierarchies of the traveling literary elements from the Russian originals. The effort to consider the reciprocal, complicated encounters occurring in translation invokes the pioneering studies of translated modernity in East Asian national literatures by Lydia Liu and Naoki Sakai, which have fundamentally reshaped our perspectives of national literature from a dichotomy between foreign influence and indigenous cultures to multidimensional negotiations among cultures. Translation's Forgotten History comes late in the process, but as the first work focusing on Korea specifically, it contributes greatly to our understanding of the role of translation in the makings of East Asia's national literatures.The first chapter, “Manipulation of Fame and Anxiety: Construction of a Model Intellectual and a Theory of Literature,” discusses Ch'oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su, arguably the father of modern Korean poetry and the father of the modern Korean novel respectively, and their uses of Tolstoy's writings “in order to validate their own thoughts on modern intellectuals and a new literature” (47). Tolstoy's fame and moral authority were emphasized, actively appropriated, and even deified, to legitimatize their argument for the roles of writer and literature in colonial Korea. While the Korean adoption of Tolstoy was prefigured by the Japanese reception and interpretation, Cho stresses that translations were also driven by Korean writers' strong interests and the goals they tried to achieve through translation. In some cases, their interpretation was contrary to Tolstoy's original argument, a deliberate effort to further their particular political or social purpose. Also, the chapter compellingly traces Yi Kwang-su's intention to conceal or minimize Japanese influence in his adoption of Tolstoy. Cho interprets Yi's neglect of the Japanese texts as a symptom of coloniality in Korean literature, a desire to erase the ubiquity of Japanese mediation which still exists in contemporary studies of national literature and which Cho aims to challenge in this work.Chapter 2, “Rewriting Literature and Reality: Translation, Journalism, and Modern Literature,” presents the short story “Fire,” an adaptation of Chekhov's “Sleepy,” by Hyŏn Chin-gŏn, as a convincing case of translation as a constructive force in producing literature that engages with lived realities in Korea. By creating a young female arsonist who is suffering from sexual abuse and archaic customs, Hyŏn, who is agreed to be the founder of the Korean short story genre, criticizes the custom of early marriage, a vehemently debated issue in Korean society at the time. Hyŏn's appropriation of “Sleepy” enabled him to grapple with contemporary social issues, and eventually influenced a growing, sympathetic discourse on female arson in journalist writings. Further, along with Hyŏn's “Fire” Cho brings two different adaptations of Chekhov's text by writers from Japan and New Zealand to the discussion, showing each text's engagement with its own society's problems. With this broadening analysis, the author demonstrates the process of translation as “complicated multidimensional encounters” (130) among cultures, rather than merely unilateral and hierarchical influence or diffusion.The last chapter, “Aspirations for a New Literature: Constructing Proletarian Literature from Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” redresses the existing scholarship, which has mechanically associated Korean proletariat literature with Soviet proletarian literature. Cho pointedly notes that for Korean writers the term “proletariat” meant colonized, oppressed Korean people, including the writers who themselves were often from the bourgeois class. Juxtaposing On the Eve by Turgenev and “Nakdong River” by Cho Myŏng-hŭi, a renowned proletarian writer, Cho argues that it was prerevolutionary Russian writers who had an impact on Korean proletarian writers. Such a novel argument in Translation's Forgotten History offers a persuasive answer to the unanswered question of why Korean proletarian literature was mostly written by and dealt with the concerns of intellectuals, without flattening such characteristics as merely the result of simple external transplantation or an incompleteness of Korean proletarian literature.Translation's Forgotten History is well structured and convincingly supported by thorough analyses, while offering thought-provoking interpretations of translation practice and dynamic cultural negotiations. The book makes a meaningful contribution to the continuing scholarly trends of recent Korean studies, namely criticism of persistent nationalist approaches and reconsideration of colonial modernity. But it is also remarkable for its new conceptualization of translation as an active process of constructing a new literature and subjectivity. Thus, scholars and students in the fields of translation, comparative literature, and world literature will find this book helpful and engaging, although the immediate target audience of the book is those who are interested in Korean and East Asian literature, cultural history, and intellectual history. Further, this book contributes to postcolonial studies in its discussion of literary resistance of colonized writers and its rethinking of colonial legacies and their lingering effects on the contemporary research.