This book arises from some shared concerns about the relations between translation and literature in three East Asian cultures, namely, China, Japan and Korea. These concerns are, fi rst, how translation engages with multilingualism in East Asia past and present, raising in particular the question of translation between different layers of high-register literary language and between written and spoken vernaculars; second, the Chinese script and classical Chinese canonical texts as a shared linguistic and textual heritage in both premodern and modern East Asia, which provides comparative and interconnecting contexts of literary circulation, translation and reception; and third, various reading, writing and commentarial practices in East Asia that may be considered translational in different degrees and ways and how they offer new food for thought about the concept and theories of translation.