Translation's Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature is the first book to rethink the birth of modern Korean literature through its relation to the structuring forces of the nineteenth-century Russian realist literature and the Japanese mediation of this import. While the Russian literary connection has been a widely accepted fact, there has been no systematic, scholarly examination of these relations in English or in Korean. The theoretical premise of Heekyoung Cho's book carries on the groundbreaking lessons about “translation” from Naoki Sakai and Lydia Liu, that is, to situate translation at the heart of cultural and ideological encounters across multiple languages and ultimately to understand “translational transaction” as a process that figures and produces differences, rather than regarding translation as a production of equivalence. Deftly moving through primary sources in three languages—Korean, Russian, and Japanese—Cho further develops these theories of translation by elevating translation as a “methodology” to think through the flows of ideas, styles, literary forms, discursive practices, and ideological worldviews. Her meticulous research brings out the material constructedness of modern Korean literature that came into existence through the contingent concatenations of circumstances and inexorable forces of power, such as the availability of translations, overseas students, individual connections, censorship, journalistic and publishing infrastructure, etc., in the colonial and imperial contexts of Korea and Japan. And Cho arrives at her conclusion that these extremely complex translational transactions among Russian, Japanese, and Korean helped to “create Korean literature” of varying stripes and tendencies. Deconstructing the very definition of “national” literature, Cho's book infuses new meaning into the notion of “Korean literature,” one that is dynamic, relational, and processual, historically denser, culturally hybridized, and transnational, and yet therefore singularly “Korean.”

Chapter 1, “Manipulation of Fame and Anxiety: Construction of a Model Intellectual and a Theory of Literature,” explores two intellectuals, Ch'oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Kwang-su, arguably the most influential figures in the formative phase of modern Korean literature and thought, via their connections to Tolstoy and in particular his theories of labor, peasantry, and literature and art.

In chapter 2, “Rewriting Literature and Reality: Translation, Journalism, and Modern Literature,” Cho turns her attention to a key writer, Hyŏn Chin-gŏn, often considered to be the “father of critical realism” in South Korean literary criticism, in relation to Chekhov, whose influence swept across all of East Asia. Again balancing Cho's study of the larger context with close analysis, this chapter illuminates the ways in which Hyŏn's selective appropriations and reinscriptions of Chekhov helped Hyŏn to invent an unprecedented protagonist, that of a working-class female arsonist as a figure resisting the colonial capitalist class system and feudal patriarchy. Delving into the newspaper coverage of female arsons at the time and the ongoing critical debate on the custom of early marriage, this chapter also offers a translation of ideas between literature as a cultural-social institution and journalistic discourses as a key medium.

The last chapter, “Aspirations for a New Literature: Constructing Proletarian Literature from Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” is probably the most important. While there has been a copious amount of literary criticism on the colonial-period proletarian literature produced in 1990s South Korea, Cho's work advances a wholly new thesis by tracing these works, not to the Soviet-era literature and literary theories, but to the earlier Russian literature of social reforms and modernizing nationalism in the prerevolutionary period. The chapter examines closely one of the founding texts of the left, Cho Myŏng-hŭi's “Naktong River,” by analyzing Cho's own efforts at translating Turgenev and engaging with his literature. Cho explores major leftist concepts, such as labor, mutual aid, and equality, that appear not only in Cho Myŏng-hŭi's works but also in other contemporary Korean socialist thinkers’ writings. She is able to tease out how Cho Myŏng-hŭi and other Korean writers developed their own sense of “internationality and contemporaneity” through their engagement with Turgenev. I believe one of Translation's Forgotten History’s wide-ranging and long-lasting contributions will be that the book's assertion about the colonial proletarian literature's closer affinity to the earlier Russian literature will have further explanatory power for the larger Marxist movements of colonial Korea beyond the literary sphere.

The three chapters—first on the altogether revolutionary idea of labor as sacred and vital to a nation, second on the intersection between reforming patriarchy and class division of a modern ethnonation, third on the most radicalized vision of class equality while fighting for the sovereignty of the colonized nation—cohere together to illustrate the ways in which “Korean” literature, through its formative relations to translations of Russian literature, mediated by Japanese-language authors, translators, and literary institutions, helped to lay the ideological foundation for modern Korea. Translation's Forgotten History explains Korean writers’ preference for Russian literature over other European literatures due to the somewhat similar historical circumstances of its need for nation-building, modernization, Westernization, and social reform. The book argues that Korean authors also strategically deployed the renown of Russian authors like Tolstoy to further legitimate their own ideas and to simultaneously disavow any connection to Japan and its role as a conduit.

Translation's Forgotten History rewrites the history of modern Korean literature and thought by unearthing the buried relations of “translation,” which Cho redefines as an integral dimension of creating something new and as an intrinsically transformative process. The book is recommended for any student of modern Korea who is historically minded and interested in the very complex construction of colonial modernity and the primacy of culture in that overall process. It is also likely to be eminently useful and relevant to those in Chinese and Japanese studies as well as to those who are interested in translation studies. Theoretically speaking, Translation's Forgotten History, which treats the earlier phase of Korea's modernity, the 1910s and 1920s, will continue to make itself pertinent and applicable in the context of intensified cultural exchange and hybridization, that is, “translation,” in the age of accelerated cultural globalization.