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ABSTRACT
This article first calls attention to the contrast between, on the one hand, East Asia's global prominence and the region's long intertwined literary history, and on the other hand, the failure of the field of world literature to integrate fully East Asian literatures. I then probe two case studies of world literature from East Asia: the thirteenth-century Mongolian Secret History of the Mongols (Mong. Mongγol-un niγuča tobčiyan, 
Chn. Yuanchao mishi, M元朝秘史, c. 1228); and the twentieth-century Korean writer Yi Ch’ŏngjun's (이청준) novel Your Paradise (Tangsindǔl ǔi ch’ŏn'guk, 당신들의 천국, 1976) on the Sorokdo leprosarium. These two narratives have circulated extensively within East Asia as well as globally, yet neither has been included in discourse on world literature nor, in the case of Yi Ch’ǒngjun's novel, in discourse on medical humanities.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Mark Elliott and Miya Xie for proofreading this article and to Anne-Sophie Pratte for expert assistance with the Mongolian language. Thank you as well to Nicholas Roth and Daniel Majchrowicz for expert assistance with the Urdu translation of Your Paradise.
Funding
A grant from the Harvard University Asia Center assisted in the preparation of this article.
Notes on contributor
Karen Thornber is Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center, Chair of the Harvard University Council on Asian Studies, and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where she is also director of the Harvard Global Institute Environmental Humanities Initiative. Her teaching, research, and extensive publications center on the literatures and cultures of East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) in local, regional, and global perspective; comparative and world literature; comparative global indigeneities, literatures, and cultures of the Indian Ocean Rim; and diaspora/migration, gender, translation (transculturation), trauma, and the environmental and medical humanities.
Notes
1. See in particular Thornber, “Comparative Literature.”
2. In comparison, Europe's population is about 750 million. Vietnam is often considered culturally part of East Asia.
3. The Fortunate Lover was first translated into European languages at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is unclear whether Goethe read the novel in German, English, or French. See Tsu for more on the eighteenth-century translations of this novel into European languages (Sound and Script 127–28). Goethe was not the first to speak of world literature, but his conceptions of this phenomenon had the greatest impact. For earlier conceptualizations, see Siskind (15) and D'haen (5).
4. For an overview of the exclusion of East Asian literatures in anthologies of world literature, see Akikusa's “Kanon o hakaru” and “‘Sekai bungaku.’” Akikusa demonstrates that Asian materials comprise only about twenty-five percent of many world literature anthologies, with literatures from East Asia at around twelve percent (“Sekai bungaku” 40), about half of what might be expected given East Asia's population and prolific literary output. This is not to suggest that world literature anthologies and other endeavors should base selection solely on population statistics or similar rubrics, but it only cautions that Europe especially tends to be overrepresented.
5. Morgan's blog was titled “A Year of Reading the World.” Especially apt are her comments regarding stereotypes and access to non-Western literature, particularly African literatures. The Norton anthology's “Contemporary World Literature” section actually features 26 writers, 14 of whose work appeared initially in English and 12 of whom write in other languages.
6. A principal example is the Japanese novelist and critic Masamune Hakuchō (正宗白鳥, 1879–1962), who initially had dismissed Genji as “limp and slippery and devoid of anything that might strike a chord in readers’ hearts.” But after hearing a visitor to Japan enthusiastically praise the text, he picked up a copy of Waley's translation in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, and after reading it, he declared, “If this English translation were translated anew into Japanese, it might attract a large and avid readership that would enjoy it as one of the great novels of the world” (qtd. in Emmerich 323–30).
7. For background on world literature in China, see Tsu, Sound and Script 112–43 and “World Literature” 158–67. Today, as at many points in history, pride in their national literatures is common in East Asia, as is the case in many sites globally, including in Iceland, which publishes more books per person than anywhere in the world and where, throughout the capital Reykjavik, there are benches where people can scan their smartphones and hear readings from Icelandic literature (Nelson). In 2011, Reykjavik was declared by Unesco to be a “City of Literature,” only the fifth in the world at the time to receive this distinction; Unesco has now designated 11 metropolises as Cities of Literature, all of which are in Europe/North America, with the exception of Dunedin, New Zealand, and Melbourne, Australia.
8. Ikezawa's anthology includes texts from Africa, Latin America, East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as Europe and the United States. For a genealogy of Japanese anthologies of world literature, see Akikusa, “‘Sekai bungaku.’”
9. Also noteworthy in this regard is Korea's annual Incheon Asia Africa Latin America Literature Forum (인천 AALA 문학포럼), sponsored by the city of Incheon, which brings together writers and scholars from these three regions for several days of dialogue. The forum was inaugurated in 2010, with panels on a variety of topics including “World Literature Beyond Eurocentrism” (유럽중심주의를 넘어선 세계문학).
10. This world map is a replica of a Van der Grinten projection based on international boundaries as of 1939 and is dated December 1943; initially, of course, it included Asia.
11. Another telling example is the Institute for World Literature (IWL), a four-week summer program directed by Harvard University's David Damrosch that brings together more than 100 participants from several dozen countries. The IWL meets every third year in East Asia, and many of its affiliate institutions and participants are East Asian (primarily Chinese), yet the institute still clearly privileges European literatures. For instance, when the IWL has been held in Europe (Istanbul in 2012 and Lisbon in 2015), the IWL faculty has not included a single scholar with expertise in East Asian literatures. The reverse, however, is not the case; when the IWL has been held in East Asia (Beijing in 2011 and Hong Kong in 2014), most of the faculty members have had expertise in European literatures, with a number also fluent in East Asian literatures.
12. Likewise, in Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature, Aamir Mufti draws attention to “the continuing dominance of English as a literary language and a cultural system of international reach” (publisher's blurb). Interestingly, however, scholars of world literature have not engaged with the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar, which at twenty-five times the size of the Iliad is the world's longest epic and continues to be a vibrant oral epic in communities across Tibet, Asia, and beyond (Thornber, “The Many Scripts”). Gesar and Tibet's oral tradition more generally also enjoy a vital presence in modern Tibetan fiction and poetry (Jabb 18–20, 65–66, 69–75).
13. Mongolia claims a population of 3 million, most of whom are of Mongol ethnicity; nearly 6 million ethnic Mongols live in Inner Mongolia (North China), Xinjiang (Northwest China), and Northeast China, in the area historically known as Manchuria. Bergur Moberg recently coined the helpful term “ultraminor literature” to refer to literatures with a small language community (e.g., Faroese, with just 50,000) or to literatures in a peripheral relation to an already minor or peripheral language/literature (e.g., Faroese in relation to Danish). What, however, about corpuses such as Mongolian literature, which has a much larger language community and is peripheral to China (which is anything but itself “minor” or “peripheral”) but has been designated as unimportant (i.e., perhaps even less than minor) by the “world.”
14. See, for instance, Simon Wickham-Smith's English-language translations of Mongolian verse.
15. Much of Mongolia's literary heritage was destroyed during the early Ming, as the Chinese sought to remove traces of Mongolian culture (Bender 1049). Secret History was commissioned by Genghis's son Ögödei (1186–1241).
16. For more on the many scripts of the Chinese scriptworld, see Thornber, “The Many Scripts.”
17. Man'yōgana is Japan's earliest writing system and likely was adopted from Korean use of Chinese characters (Miner, Odagiri, and Morrell 288). Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, before the development of Classical Mongolian, the Mongolian language was written in four scripts: Uyghur Mongolian script, ‘Phags-pa script, Chinese script, and Arabic script; limited material used Western scripts (de Rachewiltz).
18. The Ming transcribed and translated the Mongolian original during 1368 to 1382 (Cleaves xxiv). See also Cleaves for what he terms a “tentative textual lineage” of Secret History.
19. In the words of Halliday, “With the Mongolian version as the starting-point, the Gloss may be called ‘interlinear’ in arrangement and the Chinese version ‘intersectional’ (by paragraphs). Each complete paragraph is given first in Mongolian with interlinear Gloss; this is then followed by the complete paragraph in Chinese” (25).
20. de Rachewiltz outlines the translation history of Golden Summary (lv–lix).
21. Cleaves points out that Palladiǐ gained access to the Mongolian text in Chinese transliteration six years after the publication in 1866 of his Russian translation of the abridged Chinese translation of Secret History. Palladiǐ later produced another translation, this time based on the Mongolian-language text (xxii). Cleaves provides a thorough introduction to the early discussion and transmission of Secret History.
22. The dates listed refer to the first date of translation into the designated language; several languages, most notably modern Mongolian in Uyghur script, Japanese, Chinese, and English, have enjoyed multiple translations. Oirat and Buryat are Mongolic languages.
23. At the same time, Waley states in his introduction that he consulted the Mongolian text regularly and that he had been studying the Mongol language “for some thirty years, but I am far from being a Mongolist” (7–8).
24. For more on the contributions of imperial Mongolian women to Mongol history, see Broadbridge.
25. Weatherford is best known for Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004), which examines changing European depictions of Genghis Khan and the Mongols and emphasizes the Mongol role in sparking the European Renaissance.
26. Both within and outside East Asian studies, East Asian literature generally is understood to mean Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literatures.
27. For exceptions, see, among others, Anker, Harlow, and Nixon.
28. For more on the Urdu translations of East Asian literatures published by Mashal Books, see Thornber, “Official Smugglers.” There are of course numerous global literary trajectories that require further investigation; in the case of East Asia, these trajectories include interactions between East Asia and other regions of Asia, the Indian Ocean Rim, and Latin America.