과학서사의 번역과 그 영향:파브르 『곤충기』의 한국 근현대 수용사

Abstract

Korea’s modernization can be summarized as “colonization and liberation, war, country-led education for citizens, and economic development.” The history of Korea’s reception of Jean Fabre’s Book of Insects—the most popular educational book that has lived through this period—envelops the history of mentality and policies of each generation as well as the footsteps of culture receptors. During the colonial period, Book of Insects was accepted under the affinity between anarchist and philosophy critical of mainstream ideas. However, after liberation, the book is consumed in a way that contributes to the formation of citizen’s nation. The focus on biology, which explores national territory and biological organisms that live in them, as the “study of the nation” has led to increased production of Korean books instead of translations of foreign works. These books were authored based on the reception of western and Japanese natural science during the colonial period. Later in the 1960s, the first Korean translation of a foreign work was published. Amid the government-led industrialization and citizen’s education during the period, this translation was replete with explanations and recommendations that buttress the virtues that each member of the society should value, such as sincerity, diligence, loyalty, and motherhood. Furthermore, the work justified the items of “citizens ethics” based on natural law; ironically, however, Fabre cautioned himself against such justification. Book of Insects being recommended as a text that promotes citizens’ morality and social consciousness since liberation clearly reveals the narrative point in which “scientification” and “moralization” converge. Until the 1980s, Fabre’s Book of Insects was mentioned by intellectuals as the symbol of “scientific attitude and narration,” and the public received it with similar attitude. Fabre’s Book of Insects—a so-called scientific narrative—sought to observe an object objectively and even describe the author’s subjectivity objectively. The massive episodic structure of Book of Insects offered a possibility to re-contextualize the text in accordance with the citer’s beliefs, philosophy, and purpose. Moreover, the rather free structure of the text allowed the book to be recognized as a variety of genres, such as an observation, essay, journal, and biography. Such features led the readers to consider Book of Insects to be something between a fable and a scientific text. The first Korean production of Book of Insects that was published twenty years after the first introduction of the Japanese translation and the publication and reception of Korean translation again twenty years later allow us to gauge the boundaries and bridgeheads between science and literature, translation and creation, and knowledge and common sense.