Reading O Changhwan Translating Sergey Esenin in Seoul, 1946

Abstract This article explores the allegorical layers of meaning that emerge from one translator-poet partnership in the aftermath of the collapse of the 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 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 thirty-eighth parallel into the northern zone. With the aim of rethinking the creative legacies of the early Cold War, this article explores the many meanings created in and through O’s translation.