식민주의와 민족주의, 그리고 번역: 김윤식의 한일 근대문학 번역론

Abstract

Kim Yun-sik is considered as one of the founding fathers of the field of modern Korean literature. One of the key themes in his research is the relationship between modern Korean and Japanese literatures, specifically Japan’s influence on the colonial formation of modernity in Korean literature. In discussing this topic, Kim emphasizes that literary modernity is not to be formed within closed sphere of a single nation-state, but as incessant process of complex negotiations between plural national literatures situated in asymmetric power relations. Kim’s writings on the translation between Korean and Japanese modern literatures might be the best example of such theory. In other words, Kim’s translation theory highlights how translation is complicit in colonialism’s intervention in modern nation and literature building process. Through Kim’s theory of translation, it is revealed how fundamentally colonial modern Korea and its literature are. In the colonialist system, translation is the site where it is naturally disclosed that the colonized people’s national identity are in constant process of reconstitution, and the process completely depends on the colonialists’ arbitrary disposition. Seeing the site of translation, which yields the immediate recognition of the nationalism’s complicity in colonialism, it becomes ironically possible to configure modern literature as the site of envisioning of alternative modernities. This paper argues above mentioned points examining two sets of Kim’s writings: first, Kim’s writings on the complex translation and reverse translation process of Nakano Shigeharu’s 1929 poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki [Shinagawa Station in the Rain]”; second, Kim’s works on Kim So-un’s Japanese translation of modern Korean poems.