Among twentieth-century Korean writings in English, those of Professor Insoo Lee are singularly impressive for their particular combination of wit, well-reasoned argument, and mastery of subtitles of English idiom at all levels. The importance of T. S. Eliot as perhaps the most influential English or American poet of the twentieth century is established. Professor Lee is, of course, well known as the translator of Eliot’s The Waste Land into Korean. His rendering of the defining poem of the first half of the twentieth century stands today as a monument in the history of Korean translation. Eliot had influenced the works contained in the volume Inside Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Voice of Korea, containing the collected essays, translations, and journalistic articles produced by Professor Lee. Each also was a force for assuming personal moral responsibility in an age defined by warfare, by the trauma resulting from warfare and destruction: the period of World War I and II and the challenges of the subsequent so-called Cold War, and by a general moral lassitude in the era. The English language writings of Professor Lee attest not only the general influence of the era in which Eliot wrote, they also reveal some of the themes and turns of phrase that characterize the writings of Eliot.

• Noel Harold KAYLOR, Jr.(Troy University)