[Membroj] Korean literature & Esperanto: the historical link

[Ralph Dumain]

Very interesting research:

CIRA: Poetics, Pedagogy, and Alternative Internationalisms: From the 
Early 20th Century to the Present
Grant recipients
7/28/2003
http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/grarticle.asp?parentid=4516

Note:

WALTER K. LEW. Visiting lecturer, MFA Program in Creative Writing, 
Antioch University,
  L.A.; graduate student (cultural and comparative studies), Dept. of 
E. Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA.

III. Poetry's Use of New and Old International Languages in the 
Struggle for National Identity and Independence
WALTER K. LEW (Visiting lecturer, MFA Creative Writing Program, 
Antioch University,
L.A.; graduate student in cultural and comparative studies, Dept. of 
E. Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA).

  As can be seen from the fact that the main Leftist arts and 
literature organization in Korea during the late 1920s and early 
1930s went by an Esperanto title ("Korea Artista Proletaria 
Federacio"), Marxist internationalism and Esperantists' hopes of 
providing an easily learned, common language to promote international 
understanding were clearly joined in the minds of prominent Korean 
intellectuals during the colonial era. Indeed, the ideals and 
potential of Esperanto had already been grasped and written about 
enthusiastically by Korean literati during the early 1920s regardless 
of its possible synergy with Marxism. There followed a fertile, 
complex interaction between Esperantist activities in Japan and 
Korea, Korean linguistics and cultural nationalism, struggles against 
Japanese rule, and literary translation into Korean of Western and 
other Asian poetries (Rabindranath Tagore was the most frequently 
translated poet during the 1920s, albeit from English versions). All 
of these were crucial to the development of modern Korean poetry. Yet 
no Western scholarship has investigated the connection between 
Esperanto and colonial-era literature and there has been no 
significant South Korean study on the topic since 1976. Lew intends 
to unearth the history of Esperanto in Korea, which began in the 
royal court in 1906, placing it within the larger context of the 
extreme vicissitudes of Esperanto's political history during the 
first half of the twentieth century, an epic tale of internationalist 
utopianism and its persecution under Stalin, Nazism, and Japanese 
imperial rule about which there is only one major study (written in 
Esperanto and so far untranslated). Comparisons will be made with 
Esperanto movements in China and Japan.