Sin Ch’aeho was born in 1880 into a family with scholar-official backgrounds in Ch’ungch’ŏng Province. Just like the cases of Liang Qichao and Shiba Shirō, Sin Ch’aeho’s yangban clan was already in significant decline at the time of his birth, as the domestic politics slipped into chaos. Losing his father at the age of nine, the young Sin received an orthodox education based on the Confucian Classics from his grandfather as
well as tutors. A gifted child, Sin was admitted in 1898 to the Sŏnggyungwan 성균관, the top state-run Confucian academy based in Seoul, where he pursued classical learning and obtained the highest paksa 박사 degree in 1905. It was only a year before Sin Ch’aeho
was admitted to this academy that the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1897) had abandoned its
tributary status vis-à-vis the Qing and established itself as an independent state that called
itself Korean Empire (Taehan cheguk 대한제국, 1897-1910). Its sovereignty, however,
was far from stable as it was faced with competing interventions from Japan and Russia; domestic politics was divided by enduring power struggles between factions, both within and beyond the court, fighting over the extent and speed of modernization measures. Meanwhile, the modest Gwangmu Reform under the initiative of Emperor Gojong’s (r. 1863-1907) court was taking effect, when the government was finally forced to sign the Protectorate Treaty with Japan in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Korea as a result ceded diplomatic sovereignty to Japan, effectively becoming its
protectorate state. Though he obtained a position at the Sŏnggyungwan upon graduation, Sin Ch’aeho was greately concerned with these ominous political developments and eventually gave up his career at this bastion of traditional scholarship, shifting the stage for his intellectual activity to the modern publishing world. He served on the editorial
boards of two of the leading Korean-language daily newspapers: Hwangsŏng sinmun
황성신문(Capital Gazette) and Taehan maeil sinbo 대한매일신보(Korea Daily News).
These newspapers, as well as other modern journals and magazines, provided crucial venues for Sin’s prolific publication, through which he became a young leader of the nationalist, anti-Japanese, and reformist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, a movement that would later become known as the “Patriotism and
Enlightenment Movement” (Aeguk kyemong undong 애국계몽운동). It was during this
period that Liang Qichao’s work exerted great influence on reformist Korean intellectuals, including Sin himself.
Sin Ch’aeho’s numerous writings in this period ranged from political manifestos to historical treatises, from translations to literary creation. The single most important thread that informed his work was the idea of minjok민족, or, the nation. Sin Ch’aeho
passionately advocated nationalism as a critical ideology in order to at a time counter Japanese imperialism and dismantle the ideology of “sadae chuŭi 사대주의,” a
traditional Korean diplomatic strategy against Chinese Empire based on the idea of the small (i.e., Korea) “serving the great [i.e., China].” Urgency for creating national
subjectivity in Korea compelled Sin to translate Liang Qichao’s Italian Heroes. Inspired by this work, he wrote literary biographies of three national historical heroes. The national heroes Sin worked on are Ŭlji mundŏk 을지문덕 (f. late 6th-early 7th C.), a
military general of Koguryŏ (37 BCE-668 CE) whose shrewd tactics helped Koguryŏ
achieve the legendary victory against the Sui (581-618) military campaigns; Yi Sunsin
이순신 (1545-98), a naval commander famed for his epic fight in the Imjin War (1592-
98) waged by the Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98); and Ch’oe
Yŏng 최영 (1316-88), a talented general of Koryŏ (918-1392) who led campaigns against the Yuan (1271-1369) and successfully reclaimed northern territories.71 Sin Ch’aeho’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71Taedong Sach’ŏn chae cheil dae wiin Ŭlji mundŏk chŏn (The
Biography of Ŭlji mundŏk, the Greatest Hero in Korea in Four-Thousand Years) was published from Taehan Hwangsŏng Kwanghak Sŏp’o in 1908; Sugun cheil wiin Yi Sunsin (Yi Sunsin, the Greatest Man of Navy) was first serialized in Taehan maeil sinbo from May to August 1908;
historiographical works were also infused with nationalist zeal, including the
groundbreaking Toksa sillon 독사신론 (New Discourse on Reading History, 1908) and
the magnum opus Chosŏn sanggo sa 조선상고사 (History of Korean Antiquity, 1931;
1948).72
Roughly two and a half years after Liang Qichao stopped serializing the translation of Shiba Shirō’s Kajin no kigūin Qing yi bao, Liang started to publish the
creative biography Italian Heroes in the journal Xinmin congbao (New Citizen
Journal, 1902-7). This new journal was launched by Liang to succeed Qing yi bao, which had been terminated due to a fire in 1901. Italian Heroes fetures the three founding figures of the modern Italian nation-state –– Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), and Count Camillo di Cavour (1810-61) –– and creatively retells the history of the Risorgimento. Liang’s work, in fact, is an adaptation of a few Japanese
texts on modern Italian history, namely one by the writer Hirata Hisashi (1872-
1923) called Itarī kenkoku sanketsu (The Three Italian Nation-Building
Heroes, 1892).73 Hirata’s text is a Japanese translation of The Makers of Modern Italy
(1889), a history of modern Italian nation building based on lectures given at Oxford by a English scholar/politician by the name of John Marriott (1859-1945).74 Just within a few
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
was also first serialized in Taehan maeil sinbo from December 1909 to May 1910, just three months before Korea was annexed to Japan.
72 First published as Chosŏn sa 조선사(History of Korea) in Chosŏn ilbo조선일보 (Korea Daily) in 1931,
then published in book format in 1948 as Chosŏn sanggo sa.
73 For the Japanese sources of Liang Qichao’s creative biographies, see: Yōji Matsuo, “Ryō Keichō to
Shiden.”
years after its publication, Liang Qichao’s Italian Heroes was translated into Korean at least four times. The first, published in the newspaper Taehan maeil sinbo in 1905, was an abridged version focused on the figure of Mazzini; the second, also abridged, was serialized in the newspaper Hwangsŏng sinmun in the following year. Then, Sin
Ch’aeho’s translation, entitled Yit’aeri kŏn’guk samgŏl chŏn
(Biographies of the Three Italian Nation-Building Heroes), executed in the “mixed style,” was published in 1907, which was followed by a 1908 translation in the Korean script by the renowned linguist Chu Sigyŏng 주시경 (1876-1914).75 Sin Ch’aeho’s was the first to translate Liang Qichao’s text in its entirety, and is recognized as “the most influential” among the four.76 In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Italian
Risorgimento became a significant source of inspiration for intellectuals aspiring for nation building in many parts of the world, including India.77 Into that global circulation of ideas, East Asia subscribed itself through the multilayered translations and adaptations –– first from English into Japanese, then from Japanese into Chinese, and finally from Chinese into Korean. Within a larger East Asian context, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour were just three of the many modern political figures featured in numerous historical and creative writings on “the hero” ( ; Chn. yingxiong,Jpn. eiyū, Kor. yŏng’ung) at the
turn of the century; other heroic figures included Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), George Washington (1732-1799), and Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Apart from the three Italian figures, Liang himself also wrote heroic biographies of Lajos Kossuth (1802-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75 See: U Imkŏl, Han’guk kaehwagi munhak kwa Yang Kyech’o, p.51-65.
76 Ibid., p.57. For Chu Sigyŏng’s translation in particular, see: Chŏng Sŭngch’ŏl, “Sun kungmun ‘It’aeri
kŏn’guk samkyŏlchŏn e taehayŏ.”
77 See: Gita Srivastava, Mazzini and His Impact on the Indian National Movement; C.A. Bayly and Eugenio
1894) and Madame Roland (1754-1793), based on Japanese materials. Liang Qichao and Sin Ch’aeho were among the most prolific advocates and creators of the discourse of “the hero” in early modern East Asia, whose archetype could be traced back to Thomas
Carlyle’s (1795-1881) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840).78 Having undergone these multiple mediations, the introduction of the
Risorgimento history into the intellectual discourse of early-twentieth-century Korea is an overdetermined process, far from being the simple transposition of certain standard concepts of modernity from the West into an East Asian nation. Just as Liang Qichao’s translation of Shiba Shirō’s political novel was facilitated by a transnational literary tradition shared by the author and the translator, so was Sin Ch’aeho’s translation
catalyzed by Liang Qichao’s adaptation, which rewrote the Italian history by referring to numerous precedents in traditional Chinese literature.
An anonymous review that appeared in Hwangsŏng sinmun just a few months
after the publication of Sin Ch’aeho’s version of translation illuminates how the mediated translation operates:
The saying goes: ‘If you do not shed tears after reading the “Memorial on Sortie” [Ch’ul sa p’yo ], you are surely not a loyal subject [sinja ].’79 So I would say if your blood does not get boiled or your crying does not become loud after reading the Biographies of the Three Italian Heroes, you are a wood- or
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78 Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History was translated into Japanese in 1893. For
the general discourse of the hero in the nineteenth century, see: Eric Bentley, A Century of Hero-Worship: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with Notes on Wagner, Spengler, Stefan George, and D.H. Lawrence.
79 This is an allusion to An Zishun’s (1158-1227) saying quoted in the popular guwen style writing
manual Wenzhang guifan (Collection of Exemplary Composition). “Memorial at Sortie” is a canonical piece by Zhuge Liang (181-234) sent to Emperor Liu Shan (r.223-263) of the Chu
stone-like man. If each of our ambitious people keeps a copy of the Biography at his side, and worships it in the morning and dreams about it in the night, there will be a day when he will undertake a patriotic endeavor.80
This reviewer emphasizes affective responses to a Korean translation of Liang Qichao’s work, most likely the one by Sin Ch’aeho, and articulates the emotions in terms of Confucian morality, particularly the virtue of “loyalty” ( ; Kor. ch’ung, Chn. zhong). The “Memorial on Sortie,” attributed to the illustrious politician/general Zhuge Liang
(181-234), is traditionally considered to be a best embodiment of this virtue.81 To the author of this brief review, the Korean version of Italian Heroes communicated not so much a certain modern idea, such as nation building, but the moral emotion associated with a traditional virtue, which, nevertheless, was believed to drive people to “undertake a patriotic endeavor.” Thus gravitated toward traditional morality, the meaning of nationalism must receive a significant twist in this process. Such a peculiar mode of translation, in fact, is prepared by the way Liang Qichao creatively rewrote the Japanese sources and narrated the lives of the three Italian nationalists, and the way Sin Ch’aeho translated that Chinese narrative into Korean. Based on the Japanese materials, Liang Qichao fundamentally altered the narrator’s point of view, and used traditional narrative devices to add emotionality and theatricality to the history. Sin Ch’aeho, while quite faithfully translating Liang Qichao’s dramatized narrative, assumed the original narrator’s voice himself.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80Hwangsŏng sinmun, November 16, 1907; quoted in U Imkŏl, op. cit., p.62.
81 Sin Ch’aeho wrote an enthusiastic preface to a literary biography entitled Mong kyŏn Chegal Ryang
The idea that the literary work functions as an affective medium capable of mobilizing people toward a political idea unmistakably reminds us of Liang Qichao’s “new fiction” (xin xiaosho) discourse. Sin Ch’aeho in fact grounds his conception of fiction/the novel (소설sosŏl) upon Liang Qichao’s idea of “new fiction.” A 1908
criticism entitled “Kŭn’gŭm kungmun sosŏl chŏja ŭi chuŭi 의 ”
(Warnings for the Authors of Recent Fiction in the National Letters), for example, bespeaks Sin Ch’aeho’s understanding of this modern genre. The qualification “in the national letters” in the title is meant to foreground the fact that the modern novels in question are not to be written in the elite “Chinese letters,” or hanmun 한문. Sin Ch’aeho
argues,
Even though a worthy and upright man, talking from a rostrum with his naturally honest appearance, discusses profound principles of the mind and things and histories of the prosperity and decline in the past and the present, the audience surrounding him will be no more than a few learned men. Moreover, even though some knowledge could be developed in this way, it will be difficult for this man to make a bad folk good or a wicked one tamed by transplanting his own
personality [into them]. But the books of fiction, which are based on street talk and colloquialisms, are not like that. All the women, children, and servants love them so much. Therefore even with a little eccentricity of ideas or a bit of virility of words, their hundred readers and thousand listeners will all end up admiring them. How much more so when the authors’ spirits and souls are present on the pages? The readers then cannot help shedding tears on reading something terrible, and arousing their energies on reading something thrilling. By virtue of the lasting
effects of edification and penetration [ki hundo nŭng’yŏm ŭi kigu 의
], their moral nature will naturally be affected and transformed [kamhua
]. Thus I claim: the general propensity of society is to be rectified by fiction written in national letters.82
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82 Sin Ch’aeho, “Kŭn’gŭm kungmun sosŏl chŏja ŭi chuŭi ,” in Tanjae Sin Ch’aeho chŏnjip, vol.6, p.639.
Hereafter quotes from this Complete Work is indicated as CJ, followed by the volume and page numbers separated by a slash. Ex. CJ, VI/639.
Echoing Liang Qichao’s critical essays, namely his “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi
論小說與群治之關係” (On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Organization of
Society, 1902), which, one may safely assume, Sin Ch’aeho must have read, fiction is first and foremost conceived of as an affective medium. The medium is capable of “affecting and transforming” the reader’s hearts and minds by virtue of its emotional effects. Sin Ch’aeho argues for taking advantage of this extraordinary function, which Liang Qichao called the “incomprehensible power” of fiction, and using it as a means for popular cultivation. While a prosaic scholarly talk may transmit some knowledge by words to a small circle of erudite people, the novel, particularly one written in the “national letters,” is able to educate the whole population, including women, children, and lower-classes people, most effectively. A telepathic medium, the novel could work either for good or bad according to the author’s moral dispositions; and if written by men of high morality, Sin Ch’aeho suggests, it can lead the ethos of the society to a good and right direction. As Sin formulates by alluding to “Yiyin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu
” (Preface to the Translation of the Political Novel, 1898), Liang Qichao’s preface to the translation of Kajin no kigū, “If there are many withered and licentious novels, the
nation will be affected and transformed accordingly; if there are many chivalrous and indignant novels, the nation will be affected and transformed accordingly. That ‘the novel is the soul of a nation,’ as some Western scholar has said, is an impeccable truth.”83 Just
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83 Sin Ch’aeho, CJ, VI/639. The expression, “the novel is the soul of a nation,” appears in Liang Qichao’s
“Yiyin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu.” See Chapter One. A similar view was also put forth by Pak Ŭnsik’s 박은식
(1859-1925) preface to his own historical novel Sŏsa kŏn’guk chi (The Nation Building of Switzerland, 1907) a Korean translation of the Chinese writer Zheng Guangong’s (1880-1906) work of the same title, published in 1902. The work by Zheng Guangong, who lived in Japan in exile and worked with Liang Qichao, is itself an adaptation of Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell (1804), probably via the latter’s Japanese translations: Yūshūkai ed., Shirureru Wiruherumu Teru chūshaku
like Liang Qichao, Sin Ch’aeho believes traditional novels in Korea were morally corrupt and exerting bad influence on the nation;84 hence the claim, which, again, transculturates Liang Qichao’s “new fiction” discourse: “I argue that it is an urgent task to wipe them [i.e., traditional novels] away by producing many works of new fiction [sin sosŏl
].”85
In Shiba Shirō’s Kajin no kigū, the novel’s affective function depended upon traditional literary language, namely classical Chinese poetry (shi ). In Italian Heroes, Liang Qichao likewise employs traditional narrative devices, which, then, are faithfully reproduced by Sin Ch’aeho in the Korean translation. The creativity of Liang Qichao’s adaptation can be best illuminated by comparing it with the Japanese materials he worked on. What distinguishes Liang Qichao’s work from its Japanese source is, first and
foremost, the narrator’s point of view, which, one may argue, allegorizes the different historical circumstances in which the two texts were produced.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Annotated, 1899); Tokuda Shūkō , Shirureru monogatari
(A Story by Schiller, 1903).
84 Sin Ch’aeho states, “Most of the traditional novels in Korea are either licentious stories from the
mulberry bushes by the Pu river [sang kan pok sang ] or strange tales of praying the Buddha for happiness. This is one thing that corrupts people’s morale.” (“Kŭn’gŭm kungmun sosŏl chŏja ŭi chuŭi,” CJ, VI/639) Sin here refers to sources like the “Yueji” chapter of Liji (Book of Rites), which reads, “The sounds of the mulberry bushes by the Pu river are the sounds of a fallen country” (sang jian Pu shang zhi yin, wangguo zhi yin ye ). Pak Ŭnsik also makes a sweeping argument in his preface to Sŏsa kŏn’guk chi: “Among the traditional novels [yurae sosŏl ] in our country Korea [a han ], you cannot find a single good book … These works are widely circulated on the streets and provide common men and women with daily food. However, they are preposterous and lewd: they are more than able to waste human minds and corrupt morale, and they do profound harm to politics, education, and morality.” Pak Ŭnsik, Sŏsa kŏn’guk chi, in Kim Yunsik, et al. eds., Han’guk kaehwagi munhak ch’ongsŏ: