한국의 초현실주의와 문화번역 - 조향의 시를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the poetic works of Hyang Cho who enthusiastically introduced the western cultural theory of Surrealism developed mainly in France, and exerted himself to build a new version of the theory under the unique cultural terrains of the 1950's Korea. It adopts a ‘cultural translation’ approach in order to take contextual differences between western and Korean cultures into account. In other words, the article analyzes the poet Hyang Cho as an agent of cultural translation, bridging the gaps between two divergent cultures and examines the way in which his own Korean surrealist poetry came into existence. His poems reflect his pioneering efforts to depart from the war-stricken nation in the early 1950s and move ahead to see the awakening of a new cultural era in the latter part of the decade. Such aspiration is occasionally revealed in his poems when contrasting the past as “an old worn genre painting” with “a charming print of the second half of the century” of the present and future. He juxtaposed and blended foreign words, loaned words, Chinese and Korean characters in his writings; fabricated poetic texts of his predecessors home and abroad using collage technique for the purpose of the honest exposition of the chaotic modern civilization where nature/culture, sacred/secular, domestic/foreign elements, and consciousness/subconsciousness are all interwoven. He also replicated surrealistic experiments in terms of the configuration of texts in the shape of reverse triangles or a descending flight of stairs, demonstrating insecure spaces about to fall apart or the downfall of civilization. This kind of figure poems demonstrates his fuller recognition of reality and sharper awareness of cultural crisis than anyone else in his time. Despite excessive subjective artificiality found in his verses and the heaps of good and bad criticism layed on his achievements, no one can deny his accomplishment in establishing the basis of rational interpretations of surrealism and identifying its exact locus from a Korean point of view. He advocated a so-called Neo-surrealism, connected dissonant images of Surrealism with the darkness of the modern civilization and ultimately sought to raise the Korean surrealism up to the level of global standards. Although his Neo-surrealism merely revealed his pessimistic viewpoint toward the world, his attempt to overlap the unconscious world with the dark side of reality, and therefore try to understand reality from the outside and analyze and evaluate it systematically, is in itself a very creative endeavor. From the perspective of ‘cultural translation’ which lay emphasis on diversity, his poems and poetics give us a chance to appreciate the significance of Surrealistic poems. His interests were not to interpret languages but to interpret cultures, which enabled him to genuinely expose hybrid aspects of culture. Implementing acoustic and linguistic experiments of surrealists coupled with rhythms in traditional Korean poetry, Hyang Cho established a ‘Korean Surrealism’, contributing to the rich flourishment of Korean literature.