Homo Translator - 울리츠카야의 『통역사 다니엘 슈타인』 읽기

Abstract

This paper will interpret Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novel Daniel Stein, Interpreter, focusing on the context of ‘translation.’ The primary identity given by the author to the main character Daniel is a ‘translator.’ The meaning of the protagonist's identity as an translator can be fully inferred only through the new concept of translation and the discourse on ‘cultural translation.’ Father Daniel Stein's identity as a translator starts from the premise that there are three problems: first, the thesis on the intrinsic hybridity of language and diaspora from mutual adhesion and conflict of multiple languages/cultures/identities, about which the cultural translation discourse and Benjamin’s translation theory, secondly, Paul Ricoeur’s discussion about the paradoxical existence of a translator and his concept of the ‘linguistic hospitality’, and thirdly, Walter Benjamin’s thesis of the ‘pure language’. Daniel’s practice of translation, staging the imbalance of power that exists between languages and the language of the other and criticizing the violence of the dominant language, could provide a practical perspective for the creation of hybrid and diasporic subjectivity which always transcends and departs from oneself, and is inherently jointed with the other, and for the co-habitation of different languages/cultures.