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Lyrical Translation is a literary history of modern Korean poetry's origins and its development through translation. As the use of Korean became increasingly restricted during the Japanese occupation, translation was not a choice but a necessity for higher education and intellectual labor. Yet it also had an expansive, creative function: Korean poets wielded it as an instrument to reimagine their literature. Around the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals began abandoning classical Chinese as the default written language to embrace a new vernacular style in prose and verse that was closer to everyday speech. Pushing back against the perception of translation as a process of simple replication, Lyrical Translation reveals how poets used it to forge an entirely new mode of poetic composition.

Drawing on a vast collection of primary materials in Korean and Japanese, David Krolikoski situates close readings of major poems against critical writing (editorials, essays, and articles) from the period. His discussion of translation illuminates the ways writers crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries in pursuit of a new idiom. In some cases, poetic composition took the form of interlingual translation as poets reworked verse by the likes of Baudelaire and Verlaine into vernacular Korean verse. In other situations, it involved the adaptation of foreign literary forms such as the prose poem. And in still other instances, translation meant composing one's own poems in two languages to address multiple readerships. Krolikoski's interpretations pay close attention to the nuances of form and language, which were in a state of flux due to the embryonic state of modern verse, and approach poetry of the era as serious expressions of political sentiments seeking to address the anxieties of modern life.