세계문학으로서 한국문학: 번역과 번역공정의 문제에 대한 고찰

Abstract

As is easily guessed, translated Korean literature has virtually little presence in the world literary market. Among many reasons to analyze this paucity of world interest in translated Korean literary works, the difficulty of English translation itself has been mostly blamed. However, given the fact that the difficulty is not applied only to Korean literature but to all non-English works, the precarious nature of the success of translated works needs to be probed in another light. Hence, I propose to examine the possibility that what domestic scholars provide as the essence of Korean literature might taste different from what foreign readers expect from reading world literatures. This means that domestic scholars need to form another approach to ‘Koreanness’ of Korean literature in order to suit the taste of non-Korean world readers. As a trial attempt, I review the research papers on modern Korean poetry and how domestic scholars have forged the nature of Korean poetry as “literature of grief.” Then using two translated texts of Ko Un’s poems, I try to show that in most cases culturally specific sentiments cannot be materialized in the educated English in the process of translation and that only a writer’s humanist gaze at and compassion for human suffering can survive the atrocity of translation and come to attain any kind of poetic achievement.