Description:

How does a translator come to choose their author? This talk explores the allegorical layers of meaning that emerge from one translator-poet partnership in the aftermath of the collapse of Japanese empire in Korea. The iconoclastic modernist poet O Changhwan’s first published book in a newly liberated Korea was a translation of poems by the deceased Russian poet Sergey Esenin. O was translating at a moment when the Korean language was returning to public life after suppression under colonial rule and amid escalating violence and division on the partitioned peninsula. Reading O’s translations and lengthy afterword opens a window onto the scene of Seoul in 1946, one year before O was to cross over the 38th parallel into the northern zone. Part of a larger project on writers who moved to northern Korea as the peninsula was divided, this talk explores the many meanings created in and through translation as it aims to rethink the creative legacies of the early Cold War.  

About Janet Poole:

Janet Poole teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book is Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories by Ch’oe Myŏngik (Columbia University Press, 2024), a translation of major works by one of Pyongyang’s most famous modernist authors. She is also translator of the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun, publishing a collection of his anecdotal essays (Eastern Sentiments) and a selection of his short stories (Dust and Other Stories). Her recent research focuses on modernist artists, including Yi and Ch’oe, who chose to remain in or move to the northern zone after the partition of the Korean peninsula in the 1940s.