Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature by Heekyoung Cho (review)

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...