ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with activities relating to translation during two phases of the 20th century in Korea: the late 1910s and the 1920s during the Japanese colonial period and the 1940s and 1950s in North Korea. In the 1910s and 1920s translation of foreign material contributed to the creation of modern literary forms, and debates between translators of the works of the Indian poet Tagore helped to raise the standards of translation. During this same period translations of the works of foreign women writers by Korean women translators promulgated the New Woman ideal. Im Sun Duk, whose work relates to translation practices of the time, was one of Korea’s first feminist literary critics in the 1930s and 1940s. She promoted the ideal of the socialist woman in North Korea in the late 1940s and 1950s. The writers and translators considered in this paper not only absorbed ideas from foreign sources, but also created new forms of writing that situate Korean literature within world trends.