Eastern Sentiments is a translation of the canonical colonial Korean writer Yi T'aejun's fifty-seven short essays, originally collected as Musŏrok. It is a fascinating glimpse into the everyday life of a colonial intellectual as a bourgeois gentleman living in the consumer society of Kyŏngsŏng during the time of thriving print media capitalism. In the context of Korean literary scholarship, both in Korea and in North America, the colonial-era writings are perennial favorites as a field of study because of their seemingly endless array of fascinating events, figures, and mix of cultures and languages. This book adds to the much-needed and growing body of quality translations of primary texts, useful for all levels of scholars, but especially for graduate students and university instructors, who will find it useful as a textbook. It showcases the author's crisply constructed sentences, his incredible erudition, and cosmopolitan sensibility, this last against which he almost seems to struggle. Like the man, the collection is a contradiction: the title and the format hark back to the Confucian scholarly tradition of the Chosŏn dynasty, while the subjects and the content sparkle with the modern conditions of life in colonial Korea in the late 1930s.
Yi T'aejun became a heavily politicized author because of his choice to go to North Korea after decolonization. The ban on his works continued until 1988 in South Korea. But regardless, he is a multifaceted figure, which may partly explain his works' popularity among today's modern Korean literature scholars. Born into a poor but educated aristocratic family, he established himself as a middle-class individual by achieving success with a very new profession—writer. What we get in this collection is yet another face of Yi T'aejun the writer as a father, husband, friend, and colleague.
Irony and contradiction, frequently associated with artistic endeavors made in politically repressive situations such as colonization, are crucial elements of Yi's essays, and they greatly benefit from both revealing and hiding much through these devices. A cosmopolitan living in a bustling colonial city that was rapidly changing, Yi is full of contradictions and complexities. He clearly despises the pervasive culture of commodification even though he was among the lucky handful who actually made a living as a writer; he extols the ideals of the Confucian gentleman-scholar and the traditional Korean culture even as he establishes himself as a modernist, especially as a part of Kuinhoe (Nine Man Society); finally, he writes, “Emotion trumps ideology in the work of art” (p. 65), yet suddenly goes to the North for its socialist ideals.
As beautiful as it is, Yi's writing demands of the reader not only patience to properly appreciate his ponderous style, but also the sensibility to see the depth of feeling invested in the seemingly random or trivial subjects of his essays. His writing ranges from sensual, as when he describes an unread book lent to a friend that returns “exhausted and ragged” after whispering its story to another man's ear first (p. 92), to prescient, “It is easy to destroy or deform nature, but we do not have the ability to create it or remake it” (p. 33), and philosophical, “The truth is that whose value never dies” (p. 110). It is also often melancholy and poignant, especially when he writes about the poor and the lost, captured particularly well in the last essay, “Record of a Journey to Manchuria.”
Janet Poole's excellent introduction attempts to reconfigure the relationship between the universal (European bourgeoisie) and the particular (Korean colonial bourgeoisie), and she connects the meaning of Eastern Sentiments to Walter Benjamin's historical and aesthetic understanding of the private and social spaces and the bourgeois individual's effort to maintain the precarious boundary between the two, pushing against the global system that was increasingly and aggressively becoming capitalist. This connection is also apropos of Yi's place not just in colonial Korean literature but in all of modern Korean literature, which is comparable to that of Benjamin's—the undisputed master of the essay form. As Poole points out, the meaning of the fragmentary writing format whose content focuses on the everyday, in light of the oppressive colonial condition, is both historically and politically significant.
Eastern Sentiments would be well worth a thorough read by those interested in colonial and modern Korean literature, and Asian literature more generally, for the simple fact that its writer's position in a national literature is canonical yet contradictory and unlike any other. But it is also our privilege that it has been faithfully rendered by a capable translator who is sensitive to the delicate nuances of the Korean original, no doubt a formidable task given the author's erudition and the vernacular Korean of the late colonial era.
