University of Hawai'i Press

On Some Issues Surrounding Dance of Anguish

First published in 1921 and reedited in 1923, Dance of Anguish—an anthology of poetry in translation by the poet and translator Kim Ŏk (1896–?)—is famous for being the first book of poetry released in modern Korea. Its first edition by the Kwangiksŏgwan publishing house featured eighty-four poems, including works by nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, Albert Samain, and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, the Russian anarchist Vasili Eroshenko, and even the ancient Greek lyric poet, Anacreon. A number of contemporary Korean intellectuals were involved in the book's production: the artist, critic, and illustrator Kim Ch'an-yŏng (1889–1960) designed its cover, the columnist Chang Tobin (1888–1963) acted as editor, and the novelist Yŏm Sang-sŏp (1897–1963) and the poet Pyŏn Yŏng-no (1897–1961) both provided prefaces—a fact that attests not only to Kim Ŏk's status in the literary scene of the time but also to a high level of anticipation surrounding this anthology of translations.1

As a collection of poems that Kim Ŏk had, starting in 1918, previously translated and published in journals such as the T'aesŏ [End Page 197] munye shinbo (Western literature news) (泰西文藝新報), Ch'angjo (Creation) (創造), and P'yehŏ (Ruins) (廢墟), Dance of Anguish was the product of the fundamental introduction of Western poetry in modern Korea. Furthermore, since the coterie journals (tonginji) of "new literature" in which these translations were published also carried the early works and literary experiments of a flourishing new generation of young writers (starting with Kim Ŏk himself), the genesis of Dance of Anguish historically corresponds to the appearance of early Korean language poetic creation in the modern period. This means that not only were the formation of early modern Korean poetry and the translation of Western poetry concomitant but also that there is a deep connection between the two. In particular, it is important to note that this anthology of poetry in translation was published before any of the young writers—most of whom were not much more than amateurs—who contributed poems to coterie journals had published anthologies of their own. In a context where the boundaries of what constituted a specialist, a professional poet, an anthology, or even modern Korean language poetry were not clearly established, this hints at the fact that Western poetry in translation assumed the role of an exemplary model. That Dance of Anguish was the first poetic anthology to be published in modern Korean, and that its popularity among readers also made it the first to be reedited, is proof of this prototypical role of Western poetry translations.

According to the memoirs of several contemporary writers such as Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) or Yi Ŭn-sang (1903–1982), Dance of Anguish was, at the time of its publication and for many years thereafter, a source of inspiration for the creative activities of the young Korean literary scene and was considered a model of style and grammar that modern Korean poetry should emulate.2 [End Page 198] The later reedition of the book in August 1923 by the Chosŏndosŏ chushik hoesa seems to confirm this enduring popularity. Ten new poems by Paul Fort (1872–1960) were added to this edition while the original content was entirely reworked, with the correction of some errors from the first edition and a transformation of the translations' style to bring them closer to colloquial speech and more specifically to the Pyŏngan Province dialect spoken by Kim Ŏk. We can therefore see this new edition as revealing a process by which Western poetry moved beyond rudimental translation to become poetry written in a naturally flowing Korean language—just like an original creation. More than anything, the reedition of Dance of Anguish not only reflects the interest and appetite of its contemporary readers for Western literature but also indicates how modern Korean poetry was formed at the nexus between two tendencies: translation and creation.

Consequently, since the 1970s, scholars of modern Korean poetry have acknowledged and examined the importance of Dance of Anguish but have focused on Kim Ŏk's translation of Paul Verlaine from the viewpoint of the history of reception of the French Symbolist movement and décadentisme in modern Korea. They thus set out to prove that after the first early instance of modern verse (the so-called sinch'esi, or "new poetry") with From the Sea to the Boy [Hae egesŏ sonyon ege] by Ch'oe Namsŏn (1890–1957) in 1908, Dance of Anguish had been the catalyst that allowed vernacular writing, Korean poetry as national literature, to incorporate the general trends of world literature and to further develop.3 This was due to Kim Ŏk's own passionate insistence—more than any other of his contemporaries and from as early as the 1910s, which is to say, well before the publication of Dance of Anguish—that modern Korean poetry had to be built by [End Page 199] taking the French Symbolist movement and décadentisme as a model.4 However, in the 2000s, research began moving toward a reappraisal of Kim Ŏk's translated poetry and its impact on the form and content of original poems, as well as toward a reevaluation of the significance and value of his ideas on translation (mostly in comparison to Walter Benjamin's theory of translation).5 More specifically, not only did Kim's coinage of the concept of "creative translation"—the name he gave to his translation mechanism in his introduction to Dance of Anguish—and his numerous subsequent essays on translation explain his artistic principles, but he also insisted that translation was the formative source of modern Korean poetry.6

However, these studies on modern Korean poetry have up until now been unable to fully clarify the significance and value of Dance of Anguish because of the following issues. First, their understanding of the anthology remains solely focused on Verlaine and therefore limited to the perspective of the French Symbolist movement and décadentisme. It is true that French poetry occupies the greater part of the anthology, but English poetry is also represented with writers such as W.B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and William Watson (1858–1935). And yet, with the exception of Yeats, the meaning of [End Page 200] the translation of work by these other poets, who have no relations to French Symbolism or décadentisme, has never been studied.

Another issue is that the question of identifying the original text of the translations that led Kim Ŏk to publish Dance of Anguish has been either treated lightly or, worse, completely ignored. Of course, among studies of the anthology published in the 1970s and 1980s, some had already identified Japanese anthologies such as Ueda Bin's (1874–1916) Kaichōon (Sound of the tide, 1905), Nagai Kafū's (1879–1959) Sangoshū (Collection of corals, 1913), or Horiguchi Daigaku's (1892–1981) Gekka no Ichigun (A group under the moon, 1925) as the original texts of Dance of Anguish and thus argued that Kim Ŏk had done an indirect translation or, more strictly speaking, a relay translation of those works.7 But not only were these studies actually more commonly published by scholars of Japanese literature than by scholars of modern Korean poetry,8 the question of the original text would remain neglected by the latter until the 2000s.

There are several reasons behind those issues, but they primarily stem from the lack of a philological perspective in research on modern Korean poetry. Indeed, there has been to date no real textual criticism of Dance of Anguish, no attempt to analyze the history of translation surrounding modern Japanese anthologies of foreign poetry and their main texts in order to compare or contrast them with Kim Ŏk's anthology. Furthermore, as will be explained further in detail below, these original texts reflect the routes and methods by which Western poetry was imported in 1910s Japan, as well as the history, the context, the tastes, and the level of understanding of world literature and [End Page 201] modern poetry that were involved in this process. In particular, the question of relay translation from English or Japanese offers a new perspective to explain the origins of modern Korean poetry and the formation of literary language in Korea. With these considerations in mind and building upon these reflections on the previous scholarly understanding of and attitude toward Dance of Anguish, the present article intends to shed new light on and reevaluate the significance of Kim Ŏk's anthology as the textual product of a relay translation.

Dance of Anguish and Its Original Texts

The Japanese anthologies of poetry in translation that Kim Ŏk used as original texts are very diverse and hold complex relationships with the translations of Dance of Anguish. In the case of French poetry, the main original texts that were used for Kim's relay translation are Ueda Bin's Kaichōon, Horiguchi Daigaku's Kinō no Hana (Flower of yesterday, 1918),9 and Nagai Kafū's Sangoshū. But as a young Korean author from the 1910s, understanding the archaic style and literary language of Ueda Bin and Nagai Kafū's translations—both published in the Meiji era (1868–1912)—was quite difficult for Kim Ŏk. Consequently, he mostly relied on Horiguchi Daigaku's Kinō no Hana, whose writing was closer to spoken Japanese.

In particular, for the texts of Remy de Gourmont and Albert Samain as well as those of the other French poets such as Henri de Régnier (1864–1936) and Laurent Taihade (1854–1919) included in the anthology's eponymous penultimate chapter, Kim could not have relied on another anthology than Horiguchi's for his relay translation.10 All those poems also appear in Horiguchi's original [End Page 202] text, and even the order in which they appear as well as the space occupied by the chapters on de Gourmont and Samain are identical. And just as Kim Ŏk gave the same title to the anthology and its penultimate chapter, Horiguchi's anthology and its penultimate chapters were both named Kinō no Hana. Among the ten poems by de Gourmont that Kim Ŏk translated, one, entitled Maeterlinck ŭi yŏn'gŭk (Maeterlinck's drama) had not even been written by the French poet. Instead, it was a translation of Horiguchi's Maeterlinck no Shibai11—an adaptation in verse by Horiguchi of a piece of criticism de Gourmont had written about Maeterlinck for his collection of essays, Le livre des masques (1896).12

But while Horiguchi only included two poems by Baudelaire and four by Verlaine in his "Kinō no Hana" chapter, Kim Ŏk included seven by the former (six in the first edition and seven in the second) and twenty-one by the latter. This difference might first stem from the respective personal poetic interests of the two authors, but it also highlights their diverging views on what being a translator entails. Indeed, at least in the context of Korea in the 1910s, Kim Ŏk was, unlike Horiguchi, trying to introduce Western modern poetry into the peninsula and considered Verlaine and Baudelaire as models that Korean poetry ought to emulate.

Because Horiguchi had only translated four poems by Verlaine, Kim Ŏk had to look elsewhere for his original texts, eventually relying on Kawaji Ryūkō's Verlaine Shisō (Poems by Verlaine, 1915) and Verlaine Shisen (Selected Poems of Verlaine, 1919), Nagai Kafū's Sangoshū, and even, in some cases, Ashmore Wingate's Poems by Paul Verlaine (1904). For Baudelaire, Kim Ŏk mainly looked at the English literature scholar Baba Mutsuo's Akku no Hana (Flowers of evil, 1919) and again at Kafū's Sangoshū. It is, however, worth noting that Baba's work itself was an anthology of relay translations whose original texts were taken from various [End Page 203] English language translations of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil by authors such as John Collings Squire, Frank Pearce Strum, Cyril Scott, and Arthur Symons.13

As was the case for French poetry, Kim Ŏk's translations of English authors were also relay translations. For his seven translations of W.B. Yeats's, poems, the original texts were mainly drawn from Japanese language anthologies such as Sangu Makoto's (1890–1967) Gendai Eishichō (Contemporary English poems, 1917) as well as Kobayashi Aiyū's (1881–1945) Kindai Shikashū (Anthology of modern songs, 1912) and Gendai Manyōshū (Anthology of contemporary manyō, 1916—an augmented and revised edition of the previous 1912 anthology).14 Makoto had compiled his anthology to use as a bilingual textbook for his classes at, among others, Hosei University, and Tokyo prefectural senior high school.15 As for Kobayashi's anthology, Gendai Manyōshū, it contained fifty-four poems by nineteen English authors such as John Galsworthy (1906–1921) and twenty poems by sixteen authors from various countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, and Russia. The English poems by Symons, William Watson, and Rosa Newmarch (1857–1940) that Kim Ŏk included in his anthology were based on Kobayashi's anthologies.

Kobayashi's Gendai Manyōshū was published during a boom of anthologies of Western poetry that had first started [End Page 204] with Ueda Bin's Kaichōon and continued with Nagai Kafū's and Horiguchi Daigaku's translations. For this reason, it also reveals many aspects of the process by which 1910s Japan formed and established its canon of representative Western poets and major works. For instance, Kobayashi opted to divide his anthology into chapters corresponding to individual European countries such as France and England, then for each region selected works from representative poets. Such a structure was typical of the anthologies of Western poetry then published in Japan, which means that by basing Dance of Anguish on Kobayashi Aiyū's anthology, Kim was not merely using it as an original text but also as a more systematic model that would determine the structure of his work.

Translation and the Invention of Modern Literary Language in Korea

A commonality found across previous research on Dance of Anguish is their focus on the quality of the translation and particularly the errors committed by Kim Ŏk. The gist of these criticisms is that Kim Ŏk was not only unable to translate correctly either French or English, but he was also unable to properly grasp the poetic meaning of the source works. In fact, these remarks are based on a misidentification of the original texts of Dance of Anguish. For instance, as we can see in the use of Baba Mutsuo's Akku no Hana as one of several original texts, Kim Ŏk's relay translations often relied on a plurality of sources. In particular, for his translations of Paul Verlaine, Kim relied on different texts for each stanza, or even sometimes each line.16 Of course Verlaine, as a particular subject of Kim's affection, constitutes an exceptional case in Dance of Anguish, but the way his works were translated reveals traces of Kim Ŏk's critical readings of the original texts [End Page 205] he relied on. In particular, Kim's Kŏmgo kkŭt' ŏmmnŭn cham (A dark endless slumber)—a relay translation of Verlaine's Un grand sommeil noir (A great black slumber)—is exemplary in this regard:

Kim Ŏk
검고 끗업는잠은
나의목슴우에 오아라
아々 자거라、모든希望아!
아々―자거라、 모든 怨歎아!
A dark endless slumber
Comes upon my life
Ah-ah sleep! All hopes!
Ah-ah—sleep! All grudges!
내게는 아모것도아니보이여、
모든記憶은 가고말앗서라、
惡이나 또는善이나…………
아々 애닯은變遷이여!
Nothing appears unto me,
All memories have gone,
Evil or good…………
Ah-ah such sad vicissitudes!
나는 무덤어구에서
두손으로 흔들니우는
다만한搖籃이노라
아々 고요하여라、 소리업서라。17
I am in the hollow of a grave
Naught but a cradle
Rocked by two hands
Ah-ah how quiet, not a sound!

[End Page 206]

Kawaji Ryūkō
暗き大いなる眠りは
わが生のうへに落つ
夢みよ、すべての希望、
夢みよすべての怨嗟。
A great dark slumber
Falls upon my life
Dream! All hopes,
Dream! All grudges.
吾はいま何もえ知らず、
吾は記憶を失ひたり
善も悪も …
あゝ悲しき物語さへ。
Now not knowing anything,
I lost my memory,
Good too, evil too
Ah-ah what a sad story.
吾は搖籃なり
塚穴の落窪に
手もて搖らるゝ搖籃なり。
靜けに、音もなき靜けさに!18
I am a cradle
A cradle rocked by a hand
In the hollow of a grave.
Quiet, quiet without a sound!

[End Page 207]

Horiguchi Daigaku
暗く果なき死の大いなるねむり
わが生に落ち來る、
ねむれかし、わが希望、
ねむれかし、わが欲よ!
A great slumber of dark and
        endless death
Comes falling on my life
Putting to sleep, my hopes,
Putting to sleep, my desires!
わが目はやものを見ず、
善悪の記憶
われを去る…………
悲しき人の世の果や!
My eyes do not see a thing,
Memories of good and evil
Have left me…………
Such is the world of a sad man!
われは今墓穴の底にありて
雙手にゆらるる
搖籃なり
ああ、人氣なし、人氣なし!19
I am now at the bottom of a
        grave hole
A cradle
Rocked by two hands
Ah-ah, lonesome, lonesome!

I have underlined the parts of Kawaji Ryūkō's and Horiguchi Daigaku's texts that are similar to Kim Ŏk's text. These correspondences not only highlight the relationship between Kim Ŏk's version and the Japanese language translations, but they also reveal the mechanisms of Kim's relay translation method. It shows that Kim composed his relay translation by assembling the parts and expressions he judged to be relatively more poetic after analyzing both Kawaji's and Horiguchi's texts.

Both Kim Ŏk's critical readings of these texts and his subsequent relay translations were only possible because of the linguistic detours and textual routes that saw the originals move [End Page 208] from French to Japanese or from French to English to Japanese. The reason why Kim Ŏk had to rely on such linguistic detours was, more than anything, his poor linguistic abilities. He did study English literature (first as a preparatory student, then in the literature department) while a student at Keio University in Japan, but only for a short period, from 1914 to 1916. And, according to his correspondence, he had only started studying French in 1920, about a year before the publication of Dance of Anguish.20 For this reason, he would have been unable to conduct a direct translation of a work from French and had no other option than to opt for a relay translation of Japanese anthologies. The specific case of Kim's use of Sangu Makoto's Gendai Eishichō—i.e., a bilingual Japanese-English textbook—also indicates that his level of understanding of English poetry did not exceed what could at the time be found in undergraduate textbooks and Japanese anthologies of translated poems.

But Kim Ŏk's relay translations were not a simple process of transcribing Japanese language translations into Korean. Instead, he strove to substitute Korean words for the Japanese words and the classical Chinese words of the Japanese originals, which would have been unfamiliar to Korean readers, in some cases going as far as inventing new Korean words for this purpose. In his preface to Dance of Anguish, Kim explained that this method was not meant to achieve a literal translation (word-for-word) but rather a free translation (sense-for-sense) and named it "creative translation" (ch'angjakchŏk pŏnyŏk).21

Strictly speaking, this method of translation was a way of domesticating the source language (Japanese) through the target [End Page 209] language (Korean), corresponding to what Georges Mounin called "transparent lenses" (verres transparents)22 translation: a way of translating that focuses on rendering the mood of the source language text rather than its linguistic, cultural, or historical specificities. In Dance of Anguish's 1923 reedition, Kim Ŏk went one step further by correcting the words and sentences of the first edition to bring them closer to the way he spoke in his native Pyŏngan Province dialect. Such a method could be characterized as an "ethnocentric translation" (traduction ethnocentrique), in the words of Antoine Berman—that is, a translation that removes all of the linguistic characteristics of the source language and domesticates the original text into the target language.23 It is through this particular method of translation that Kim Ŏk introduced to Korean readers the poetry of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Yeats, in versions that differed from the French and English originals as well as from their Japanese language relays.

But even though the source language texts that Kim Ŏk domesticated into his Korean target language were primarily Japanese language anthologies of translated foreign poetry, one must not overlook the fact that these anthologies themselves had previously also domesticated the original French and English texts into Japanese. For this reason, it would be more adequate to say that Kim Ŏk's relay translations were achieved through a layered accumulation of foreign languages (French, English, Japanese). This is particularly meaningful because it indicates that modern Korean poetry, too, and modern Korean literature, may also have emerged from such a layered accumulation of foreign languages. In this regard, we cannot overlook Kim Ŏk's pronouncement that his translation work was "a battle with the dictionary (字典)."24 [End Page 210] But in the process of translating Japanese to Korean, Kim actually heavily relied on Funaoka Kenji's Senyaku Kokugo Jiten (Korean—National Language Dictionary),25 and many of the words in Dance of Anguish that have rung strange and unfamiliar to readers both then and now actually come from entries in Funaoka's dictionary. Consequently, Kim's relay translations can be considered as a domestication of the imperial "national language" that was Japanese into the vernacular dialect of the Korean colony.

These facts appear all the more significant if we remember Yi Kwang-su's and Yi Ŭn-sang's assertions that Dance of Anguish was a model for the poetic creation, including literary style and rhetoric, of all young Korean writers in the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, the plagiarism quarrel (nonjaeng) that emerged around Kim Ŏk's relay translation of Verlaine's Un grand sommeil noir deserves further attention. On December 4, 1923, an untitled poem by No Cha-yŏng was published in the Tonga Ilbo.26 Having read it, the novelist Yŏm Sang-sŏp soon wrote a scathing criticism of the poem, accusing it of being plagiarized from Kim Ŏk's Kŏmgo kkŭt' ŏmmnŭn cham.27 But No explained that this poem called Cham [Sleep]28 was the work of an anonymous student who had plagiarized his own earlier translation of Verlaine's poem.29 [End Page 211]

Kim Ŏk
검고 끗업는잠은
나의목슴우에 오아라
아々 자거라、 모든希望아!
아々―자거라、 모든 怨歎아!
A dark endless slumber
Comes upon my life
Ah-ah sleep! All hopes!
Ah-ah—sleep! All grudges!
내게는 아모것도아니보이여、
모든記憶은 가고말앗서라、
惡이나 또는 善이나…………
아々 애닯은變遷이여!
Nothing appears unto me,
All memories have gone,
Evil or good…………
Ah-ah such sad vicissitudes!
나는 무덤어구에서
두손으로 흔들니우는
다만한搖籃이노라
아々 고요하여라、 소리업서라。
I am in the hollow of a grave
Naught but a cradle
Rocked by two hands
Ah-ah how quiet, not a sound!
No Cha-yŏng
검고끗업는잠은!
나의生命우에나라오도다!
아!자거라모든希望아!
아!자거라모든怨恨아!
나에게는아모것도보이지아니하며
모든긔억은가고말앗서라!
惡이나또는善이나!
아 애달푼變遷이여!30
A dark endless slumber
Cometh flying upon my
        existence!
Ah! Sleep! All hopes!
Ah! Sleep! All grudges!
Nothing shows itself to me and
All memories have gone!
Evil or good!
Ah such sad vicissitudes!

[End Page 212]

Unknown writer
검고끗업는잠은!
나의生命우에나라오도다!
아!자거라모든希望아!
아!자거라모든怨恨아!
내게는아모것도아니보이며
모든記憶은가고말앗서라
惡이나또는善이나…………
아! 애닯은變遷이여!31
A dark endless slumber
Cometh flying upon my
        existence!
Ah! Sleep! All hopes!
Ah! Sleep! All grudges!
Nothing appears to me and
All memories have gone!
Evil or good…………
Ah such sad vicissitudes!

As anybody can see by comparing these three texts, there is almost no difference between Kim Ŏk's text and those of No Cha-yŏng or the "Unknown writer" (published under No Cha-yŏng's name) except for three lines that were removed. But whether this was an actual case of plagiarism is of little importance in this quarrel. What is more interesting is that even though both poems are supposed to be the expression of the interiority of a lyric self, they are nothing more than imitations thoroughly identical to Kim Ŏk's text. In particular, No Chayŏng's text was introduced within a travelogue and was supposed to express the writer's feelings of romantic sorrow induced by the journey's hardships and the vision of an unfamiliar place. This means that Verlaine's poem—or rather Kim Ŏk's text—functioned as a way to represent and describe an interiority that the writer was unable to express through his prose. The real essence of the quarrel lies in the fact that Kim Ŏk's text was decontextualized (or, rather re-contextualized) without Verlaine's name in No Cha-yŏng's text, and gave an "Unknown [End Page 213] writer" who lacked his own individual rhetoric, language, and sentimentality the impetus to copy.32

We must not consider this plagiarism quarrel as a trivial event because it shows us that, to Kim Ŏk and the contemporary generation of young writers who lacked the aesthetic and linguistic forms necessary to define their individual life experiences and make sense of the feelings they evoked, Verlaine and other Western poets who were translated through the relay of the Japanese language were models to imitate. In turn, not only does this indicate that the aesthetic sensibilities of modern Korean poetry were formed through translation but also that the formation of modern literary Korean was in fact a process of domesticating the "national language" of the Empire into the colonial vernacular of Korean. The anthology Kinō no Hana by Horiguchi Daigaku and its translations of French poetry, which Kim heavily relied on while composing Dance of Anguish, were hailed in Japan as a perfect example of the unification of written and spoken speech—a successful vernacularizing of the written language (genbun itchi, 言文一致).33 This is important and symbolic when assessing the significance of Dance of Anguish and its relay translations. Indeed, this means that the publication of Kim Ŏk's anthology, and the formative process it launched for modern Korean poetry, were only made possible by stylistic innovations introduced in the Japanese language to achieve the unification of spoken and written speech.

Dance of Anguish as Product and Vestige of the Global Dissemination of Western Literature

As previously mentioned, the original texts on which Kim Ŏk relied for Dance of Anguish were Horiguchi Daigaku's Kinō [End Page 214] no Hana and Nagai Kafū's Sangoshū. But the main sources of inspiration behind these two anthologies were Adolphe van Bever's (1871–1927) and Paul Léautaud's (1872–1956) Today's poets (Poètes d'aujourd'hui, 1900/1918) and the Anthology of contemporary French poets (Anthologie des poètes français contemporains, 1906–1907) by Gérard Walch (1865–1931).34 These French language anthologies comprised of the representative works of the Symbolist movement and the Mercure de France literary journal and had already influenced the publication of a number of collections of French poetry in translation in both the United States and England. In 1913, at the time when these French anthologies were published, Horiguchi Daigaku was residing in Belgium and reading them avidly, along with the works of other poets such as Remy de Gourmont. This experience eventually led him to publish Kinō no Hana and to translate other French poetry anthologies.35

From this perspective, one can therefore see Kim Ŏk's Dance of Anguish as part of the larger phenomenon of the worldwide dissemination of the French Symbolist movement and its anthology in the twentieth century. For instance, it is particularly significant that Remy de Gourmont and Albert Samain have held a canonical place in Japan as representative poets of the Symbolist movement in a way that is completely unrelated to how both poets are perceived in French criticism today. This is obviously the result of the literary taste of Horiguchi Daigaku and Nagai Kafū, but it also means that [End Page 215] there was an understanding and a representation of "symbolism" that was specific to Japan and distinct from the French one. And this particular Japanese understanding, representation, and taste for modern French poetry was eventually reflected in Kim Ŏk's Dance of Anguish. For instance, while he only included two poems by Paul Fort in the first edition, he translated four more of his works and added a chapter dedicated to the French poet in the second edition because these four additional works were absent from Horiguchi Daigaku's Kinō no Hana but appeared in his other anthology of translations Ushinawareta Hōgyoku (The lost jewel) in 1920.36 This addition therefore clearly reflects Horiguchi's literary taste. The same was true of the English poems included in Kim's anthology. Kim's translations of W.B. Yeats's poems (like Kobayashi Aiyū's before him) are clearly deeply tied to the studies and translations of Yeats published by the Society for Research on Irish Literature (Airurando bungaku kenkyūkai) in the 1910s (and on which Sangu Makoto had also relied) as well as to the global boom of Irish literature in those years.37

However, while translating English language poetry, Kim Ŏk also included in his anthology poets from various European countries such as France, Germany, and Russia—just like Kobayashi Aiyū had previously done in his anthology Gendai Manyōshū. Kobayashi's Gendai Manyōshū is important in that unlike the anthologies of Horiguchi and Nagai, which had primarily included French poetry, it reveals the extent to which Japan had come to understand and appreciate world literature in the 1910s. In other words, for Kim Ŏk, these original texts in translation—particularly Kobayashi's anthology—were a planisphere of world literature, one that had been drawn in Japan and centered around French and English language literature. This means that these various Japanese [End Page 216] language anthologies determined the breadth and depth of Kim Ŏk's understanding of world literature.

That Kim Ŏk had read Kobayashi Aiyū's anthology and used it as the basis for his understanding of Western poetry gives us an important clue to the understanding of the nature of Dance of Anguish. Indeed, it shows that the anthology was the product of Kim Ŏk's own novel restructuring of the canon and categories of "world literature" that had been delineated through the Japanese reception of Western literature in the modern era. This is the reason why the list of works included in Dance of Anguish is at the same time similar yet different from what one may expect to find in a contemporary canon of world literature.

To Kim Ŏk, the anthology's translations were not just meant as an introduction to world literature, but they also exerted a great deal of influence on his creative work. As is well known, Kim Ŏk's early poetry—including, of course, his first collection of poems Song of Jellyfish (Haep'ari ŭi norae, 1923) as well as his few other first books—was written under the overwhelming influence of Verlaine, de Gourmont, Samain, and Yeats, as reflected in his choice of themes, subjects, and lexicon. This is of course connected to Kim's referring to his translation method as "creative translation" in the foreword to Dance of Anguish.38

For instance, the subject of autumn and the image of decay that Kim favored in the poems of Verlaine, de Gourmont, and Yeats were also the center of his lyrical grammar.39 This is reflected in his essays, too, such as "Songs Composed in Autumn" (1924) and "Autumn Songs Composed" (1925) in which Kim introduced [End Page 217] Verlaine's Chanson d'automne, de Gourmont's Les feuilles mortes, and Yeats's The Falling of Leaves as models of lyric poetry.40 And while in another essay entitled "Yeats's Love Poems" from 1925, he introduces Yeats's poetry as having popularized the sentimental agitation universally shared by Ireland's Celtic nation, he neither mentions Celtic nationalism nor Symbolism and treats all of his work uniformly as love poems.41 What is worth noting here is that in these essays, Kim Ŏk introduces these poems neither as works of the English or French symbolist movement nor as décadentisme, but merely as "lyric poetry." This means that, just as the modern Korean literary language and style that were created through Kim Ŏk's indirect translations, modern Korean poetry, or rather modern lyric poetry, was the result of the continuation of the worldwide dissemination of modern poetry (from France, England, and Japan) and the product of its reception.

The Significance of Dance of Anguish and Future Research Tasks

As we have seen until now, the significance of Kim Ŏk's Dance of Anguish is not simply limited to its position, often emphasized in previous research, as Korea's first anthology of Western poetry in translation. We can also surmise that the other collections of translated poetry that Kim published afterward, such as Kit'anjalli (Gitanjali, 1923), his various translations of Tagore's poems, and Irŏjin Chinju (The lost pearl, 1924)—an anthology of translations by Arthur Symons—were all the product of a relay translation through Japanese anthologies. But more than that, there is a need to reevaluate the statements by Yi Kwangsu and others that Dance of Anguish was the model for the literary style and rhetoric of modern [End Page 218] Korean poetic creation. Indeed, what this tells us is not just that Korean poetry was born out of translation. More importantly, the fact that modern Korean literary language developed through the domestication of the imperial "national language" and of Japanese literature's genbun-itchi style (unification of spoken and written speech) into the colonial vernacular dialect that was Korean hints at what may be the embryological genesis of modern Korean poetry.

One must also not overlook how Dance of Anguish was the product of the expansion of French and European literature worldwide and of the spread of the new literary style of unified written and spoken speech from Japan to its colonies. It is likewise important to note how the representation and categories of world literature that were defined in Japan in the modern era were reinterpreted and recalibrated by Kim Ŏk in Korea. This is particularly visible in the fact that European literature thus existed simultaneously under a plurality of forms in different places such as Korea, Japan, or France—a phenomenon exemplified by the fate of a piece of prose by de Gourmont that ended up existing as Horiguchi's poem Maeterlinck no Shibai in Japan and as Kim Ŏk's Maeterlinck ŭi yŏn'gŭk in Korea.

However, more importantly, Dance of Anguish shows us how Korea responded to the literary impact of Western modern poetry. As previously mentioned, Western poetry was, to Kim Ŏk, the model upon which to base poetic creation in Korea.42 This recommendation extended beyond the mere adoption of Western poetic themes and subjects in modern Korean poetry and included the invention of a new poetic style and rhetoric that corresponded to those of modern Western poetry. Kim Ŏk set out to achieve this through translation but encountered great difficulties in the process of making Korean match with French and English. For instance, he first translated Verlaine's Il pleure dans mon cœur in his essay Needs and Regrets (1916)—based not on the French original but using [End Page 219] Ashmore Wingate's English language translation as a relay. But very disappointed with the result from a poetic standpoint, he eventually translated it anew for Dance of Anguish, this time taking for its original text Horiguchi Daigaku's translation, Wareno Kokoroni Namida Huru, included in Kinō no Hana. This process reflects the situation of twentieth-century Korea as a non-Western colony that had to go through Japan to encounter and import Western modernity and Western modern poetry.

This may serve as a reference for the understanding of other representative Korean anthologies of translated poetry published after Dance of Anguish, such as Kim Ki-chin's (1903–1985) Aeryŏnmosa (Longing for love, 1924), Yi Ha-yun's (1906–1974) Sirhyang ŭi hwawŏn (The garden of lost fragrances, 1933), or Ch'oe Chae-sŏ's (1908–1964) Haeoe sŏjŏng sijip (Anthology of foreign lyrical poems, 1938). The works included in these Korean anthologies as well as the way they are structured follows the model of Dance of Anguish and Japanese anthologies of Western poetry. This is the product of the global expansion of French and European literature, but more than that, it indicates that Dance of Anguish remained for quite a long time the model for how Western modern poetry should be imported in Korean.

Consequently, one may say that the publication of Kim Ŏk's Dance of Anguish was a very important event, not only for research on modern Korean literature but also for understanding Korean modernity itself. In addition to its literary significance, it poses a timely question. To address this question, the first thing needed is a more substantial philological analysis of Dance of Anguish and comparative research that reads Kim Ŏk's transnational practice of translation from all sides. Beyond the interconnected contexts of Korea and Japan, such a question applies to comparative approaches across East Asia more generally. But to conduct such research first and foremost requires for scholars of modern Korean poetry to move beyond the perspective and category of "national literature" (kungmunhak). [End Page 220]

Ku In-mo

Ku In-mo is Associate Professor at the Global Leaders College of Yonsei University and specializes in modern Korean poetry and translation studies. His publications include The Ideal and Illusion in Modern Korean Poetry (Hanguk kŭndaesi ŭi isang kwa hŏsang, Seoul: Somyung Chulpan, 2008), and The Era of Gramophone, Advent of Popular Poets (Yusŏng'gi ŭi sidae, yuhaengsiin ŭi t'ansaeng, Seoul: Hyunsil Munhwa, 2013).

Benoit Berthelier

Benoit Berthelier is Lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include Korean literary history, technoculture, digital humanities, and computing history.

Footnotes

1. For instance, Kim Ch'anyŏng, who had twice reviewed Dance of Anguish, claimed that the anthology was "the first song of the new life of the Korean literary world." Kim Ch'anyŏng, "Onoe ŭi mudo ŭi ch'ulsaeng e che hayŏ [On the birth of Dance of Anguish]," Tonga ilbo, 28–30 March 1921.

2. Yi Kwangsu, "Munye swaedam sin munye ŭi kach'i 12 [Literary small talk—on the value of new literature 12]," Tonga ilbo, 28–30 March 1921. Yi Ŭnsang, "Ansŏ wa sinsidan [Kim Ŏk and the new poetic scene]," Tonga ilbo, 16 January 1929. Chŏng Nopung, "Kisa sidan chŏnmang 10 [Perspectives of the poetic scene of 1929]," Tonga ilbo, 17 December 1929.

3. Chŏng Hanmo, Han'guk hyŏndaesi munhaksa (Literary history of Korean modern literature) (Seoul: Iljisa, 1974). Kim Yongchik, Han'guk kŭndae munhak ŭi sajŏk ihae (Historical understanding of modern Korean literature) (Seoul: Samyŏngsa, 1977). Kim Haktong, Han'guk kŭndaesi ŭi pigyo munhakchŏk yŏn'gu (A comparative study of modern Korean poetry) (Seoul: Il Cho Kak, 1981).

4. Kim Ŏk, "Yogu wa hoehan [Needs and regrets]," Hakchigwang, no. 10 (September 1916). Kim Ŏk, "P'ŭrangsŭ sidan [The French literary scene]," T'esŏmuneshinbo, no. 10–11 (December 1918). Kim Ŏk, "Sŭp'ingk'ŭsŭ ŭi konoe [The Sphinx's sufferings]," P'ehŏ, no. 1 (July 1920).

5. Shim Seon-ok, "Kŭndaesi hyŏngsŏng kwa pŏnyŏk ŭi sanggwansŏng [The interrelation between Kim Euk's translation activities and the formation of Korean modern poems]," Journal of Eastern Studies, no. 62 (2008). Kim Jin-hee, "Kim ŏk ŭi pŏnyŏngnon yŏn'gu: kŭndae munhak ŭi chang kwa pŏnyŏk ŭi kwaje [Kim Eok's theory of translation: the field of modern literature and translators' task]," Korean Poetics Studies, no. 25 (2010). Park Seul-ki, "Kim ŏk ŭi pŏnyŏngnon chosŏnjok unyul ŭi chŏngch'o kanŭngsŏng [Kim Ŏk's theses on translation: pursuit of authentic Korean poetic rhythm]," Journal of Modern Korean Literature, no. 30 (2010).

6. Kim Ŏk, "Isik munje e taehan kwan'gyŏn 1 [My view on the problem of transplantation]," Tonga ilbo, 28 June 1927; "Yŏksiron (sang) [Theory of poetry in translation, 1]," Tonggwang, 13 November 1925; "Ŏnŏ ŭi immunŭn ŭmhyang kwa kamjŏng e kkaji: pŏnyŏk e taehan na ŭi t'aedo [The duty of language to emotion and sound: my attitude towards translation]," Chosun Ilbo, 27 September 1934.

7. Chŏng Hanmo, Han'guk hyŏndaesi munhaksa. Kim Ŭnchŏn, "Kim ŏk ŭi sangjingjuŭi suyong yangsang [Aspect of Kim Ŏk's reception of symbolism]," (PhD diss., Seoul University, 1984).

8. O Yŏngchin, "Kŭndae pŏnyŏksi ŭi chungyŏk sibi e taehan koch'al [Investigation into the dispute around relay translation in modern poetry in translation]," Journal of Japanese Language and Literature, no. 1 (Seoul 1979). Han Sŭngmin, "Onoe ŭi mudo e nat'anan sŏgu munye chakp'um ŭi pŏnyŏk yangsang il koch'al [Study of the aspects of translations of Western literary work in 'Dance of Anguish']," Review of Korean Cultural Studies, no. 2 (1997).

9. Horiguchi Daigaku, Kinō no Hana (Flowers of yesterday) (Tokyo: Momiyama Shoten, 1918).

10. Ku In-mo, "Kimuoku no gūrumon (Remy de Gourmont) no uta hon'yaku o yominaosu [Rereading the translation by Kim Eok of Remy de Gourmont's poetry]," Chosen Gakuho, no. 247 (April 2018); Ku In-mo, "Kim Ŏk ŭi alberŭ samaeng si pŏnyŏk ŭl tasi ingnŭnda [Rereading the translation by Kim Eok of Albert Samain's poetry]," Tong'ak ŏmunhak, no. 75 (June 2018).

11. Horiguchi Daigaku, "Gourmont Shishō [Poems of Gourmont]," in Kinō no Hana, 99–101.

12. Remy de Gourmont, "Maurice Maeterlinck," Le livre des masques (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1896), 20–21.

13. Charles Baudelaire, The Poems of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Frank Pearce Sturm (London and New Castle: Walter Scott Publishing, 1906). Charles Baudelaire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers, trans. John Collings Squire (London: New Age Press Ltd., 1909). Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. Cyril Scott (London: Elkin Mathews, Vigo Street, 1909). Charles Baudelaire, Poems in Prose from Charles Baudelaire, trans. Arthur Symons (London: Elkin Mathews, Cock Street, 1913). Ku In-mo, "Kimu oku no bōdorēru no uta hon'yaku o yominaosu [Rereading the translation by Kim Eok of Charles Baudelaire's poetry]," Chosen Gakuho, no. 253 (October 2019).

14. Sangu Makoto, ed., Gendai Eishichō, (Tokyo: Yūhōkwan, 1917). Kobayashi Aiyū, Kindaishikashū (Tokyo: Shunyōtō, 1912); Kobayashi Aiyū, Gendai Manyōshū (Tokyo: Aionkai, 1916). After Gendai Manyōshū, Kobayashi Aiyū also published two other anthologies: Kindai Shiikashū (Anthology of modern poems) (Tokyo: Kotōshoshi, 1918) and Gendai Eishisen (Selected contemporary English poems) (Tokyo: Ikueishoin, 1924).

15. The second, augmented edition of his 1917 anthology was published under an English title. Sangu Makoto, ed., An Anthology of New English Verse, rev. ed. (Osaka: Suzuya, 1921).

16. Ku In-mo, "Kimuoku no vuerurēnu uta hon'yaku o yominaosu [Rereading of Kim Ŏk's translations of Verlaine's poetry]," Chosen Gakuho, no. 243 (2018). Ku In-mo, "Kŭndaegi munhagŏ ŭi koan kwa chungyŏk [The invention of a literary language and relay translation during the modern period]," Journal of Korean Modern Literature, no. 64 (2018).

17. Kim Ŏk, "Kŏmgo kkŭt' ŏmmnŭn cham [A dark endless slumber]," in Onoe ŭi mudo (Dance of anguish) (Kwangiksŏgwan, 1921), 23.

18. Kawaji Ryūkō, "Kuraki Ōinaru Nemuriwa [A great dark slumber]," in Verurēnu Shisō (Selected poems of Verlaine) (Tokyo: Hakujitsusha, 1915), 260–261.

19. Horiguchi Daigaku, "Kuraku Hatenaki Shino Nemuri [A great slumber of dark and endless death]," Kinō no Hana, 149–150.

20. Kim Ŏk mentioned purchasing, in 1920, a textbook entitled Cours complet de Langue Française: Cours élémentaire (Tokyo: Gyōsei Chūgakkō, 1910) from the Maruzen bookstore in Tokyo. The textbook was published by the Gyōsei Catholic Mission School in Japan for the self-study of the French language. Lot. 258, "P'yŏnji / An Sŏ Kim Ŏk 28 kŏn 76 chŏm ilgwal [Letters / An Sŏ Kim Ŏk, 28 letters, 76 sheets / bundle]," Seoul: First Dong-A Auction (Munhwajigwang, 2018), 175.

21. Kim Ŏk, "Pŏnyŏkcha ŭi insa han madi (An Sŏ insa han madŭi) [A greeting from the translator (A greeting from An Sŏ)]," Onoe ŭi mudo, 10.

22. Georges Mounin, "Chapitre III. Comment Traduire?," Les belles infidèles, 2nd ed. (Villeneuve-d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2016), 74–75, 91–92.

23. Antoine Berman, "Traduction ethnocentrique et traduction hypertextuelle," La Traduction et la lettre. Ou l'Auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 29–35.

24. Kim Ŏk, "Pŏnyŏkcha ŭi insa han madi," 10. In his preface to Irŏjin Chinju, Kim Ŏk likewise confessed that he had relied on a dictionary for his translations. Cf. Kim Ŏk, "Sŏmun taesin e," in Irŏjin Chinju (The lost pearl) (Seoul: P'yŏngmun'gwan, 1924), 5. The dictionary that Kim Ŏk then relied on is thought to be the revised edition of Hidesaburō Saitō's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary. Jukugo hon'i eiwa-chū jiten (Kaichōban) (Tokyo: S.E.G. Publishing Department, 1918).

25. Funaoka Kenji, Senyaku Kokugo Jiten (Tokyo: Osaka Yago Shoten, 1919). This dictionary provided an explanation in Korean and Chinese characters for each of the 63,000 words of the Japanese dictionary, Jirin (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1907), compiled by the linguist Kanazawa Shozaburo.

26. Ch'unsŏng (No Chayŏng), "Kŏmgo kŭt'ŏmnŭn chamŭn … [A dark endless slumber]," Tonga Ilbo, 24 December 1923, 4.

27. Yŏm Sangsŏp, "Pilchu [Written denunciation]," P'yehŏ Ihu 1 (1924): 1.

28. No Cha-yŏng, "Pangnang ŭi haro 5 [Wanderings on a summer road]," Tonga Ilbo, 2 August 1921, 1.

29. No Cha-yŏng, "Ohaehan sangsŏp hyŏng ege [To Sangsŏp who misunderstood]," Tonga Ilbo, 7 January 1924, 4. No Cha-yŏng did not acknowledge the plagiarism but also did not mention the original text of the Verlaine poem cited in his earlier text ("Pangnang ŭi haro 5"), or explain why his translation was exactly the same as that of Kim Ŏk's.

30. No Cha-yŏng, "Pangnang ŭi haro 5."

31. Ch'unsŏng (No Cha-yŏng), "Kŏmgo kŭt'ŏmnŭn chamŭn," 4.

32. Ku In-mo, "Kŭndaegi munhagŏ ŭi koan kwa chungyŏk [The invention of a literary language and relay translation during the modern period]," Journal of Korean Modern Literature, no. 64 (2018): 157–158.

33. Shunsuke, Kamei, "Dai 15-shō 'gekka no ichigun' no sekai [Chapter 15: The world of A Group under the Moon]," in Nihon kindaishi no seiritsu (The construction of modern Japanese poetry) (Tokyo: Nanundō, 2016), 494–500.

34. Adolphe van Bever and Paul Léautaud, Poètes d'aujourd'hui 1880-1900, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1900/1918). Gérard Walch, Anthologie des poètes français contemporains, vol. 1 (Paris: Delagrave Leyde, 1906). On the relationship between Nagai Kafū and Horiguchi Daigaku's anthologies of French poetry and their original texts, cf. Shimada Kenji, "Hon'yaku bungaku kenkyū [Research on translated literature]," in Nihon ni okeru gaikoku bungaku (Foreign literature in Japan), vol. 1 (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1975).

35. Horiguchi Daigaku, "Shiryō 3 shiromizu-sha-ban 'gekka no ichigun' yakusha atogaki" [Document 3, translator's afterword for the edition of A Group under the Moon published by the Shiromizu company], in Horiguchi Daigaku Zenshū (Complete works of Horiguchi Daigaku), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Ozawa Shoten, 1981), 826–827. For more details on Horiguchi's life, see Hasegawa Ikuo, Horiguchi daigaku: Uta wa isshō no nagai michi (Horiguchi Daigaku: Poetry is the long road of life) (Tokyo: Kawade Shōboshinshya, 2009).

36. Horiguchi Daigaku, Ushinawareta Hōgyoku (The lost jewel) (Tokyo: Momiyama Shoten, 1920).

37. Suzuki Akiyo, "Akutagawa ryūnosuke 'shingu shōkai'-ron [Akutagawa Ryunosuke's theory of 'Synge Shokai']," in Ekkyō suru sōzō-ryoku: Nihon kindai bungaku to Airurando (Transcendental imagination: Modern Japanese literature and Ireland) (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 2014), 128–129.

38. Kim Ŏk, "Pŏnyŏkcha ŭi insa han madi (An Sŏ insa han madŭi)," 10.

39. Kim Haktong, "P'ŭrangsŭ sangjingjuŭi ŭi iip kwa yŏnghyang [The import and influence of French symbolist poetry]," in Han'guk kŭndaesi ŭi pigyo munhakchŏk yŏn'gu, 100–106. Kim Haktong et al. "Yŏnghyang kwa wŏnch'ŏn yŏn'gu [A study of sources and influences]," in Kim Ansŏ Yŏn'gu (Research on Kim Ansŏ) (Seoul: Saemunsa, 1996). Kevin O'Rourke, "K'elt'ik-yŏngguk hwanghonp'a (Celtic-English twilight) si chakp'um suyong [The reception of the poems of the Celtic-English twilight]," Han'guk kŭndaesi ŭi yŏngsi yŏnghyang yŏn'gu (Study of the influence of English poetry on modern Korean poetry) (Seoul: Saemunsa, 1984).

40. Kim Ŏk, "Kaŭl e ŭlp'ŏjin norae [Songs composed in Autumn]," Kaebyŏk, no. 52 (December 1924). Kim Ŏk, "Ulp'ŏjin kaŭl ŭi norae [Autumn songs composed]," Chosŏn mundan, no. 12 (December 1925). Kim Ŏk introduced Arthur Symons' poems, "Autumn Twilight," and "In Autumn," in these two essays.

41. Kim Ŏk, "Yi yech'ŭ ŭi yŏnaesi [Yeats's love poems]," Chosŏn mundan, no. 10 (July 1925).

42. For example: Kim Ŏk, "Yogu wa hoehan"; Kim Ŏk, "P'ŭrangsŭ sidan"; and Kim Ŏk, "Sŭp'ingk'ŭsŭ ŭi konoe" [The Sphinx's sufferings].

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