대한제국기, 세계를 번역하다 -번역하는 주체의 탄생과 한국근대문학사

Abstract

Despite their inherent heterogeneity, ‘the translated historical and biographical narratives’ of during the Korean Empire have until recently constituted the beginning of the history of modern Korean literature. However, unlike the ‘creative historical and biographical narratives’ that focused on the significance of the history of literature, most of the translated historical and biographical narratives were treated schematically in separate spaces. The ‘tradition’ that associates translated historical and biographical narratives with literary history was formed through the early works of Ahn Ja-san, Kim Tae-joon, and Im Hwa, who, while focusing on translation, did not separate historical and biographical narratives into translated and creative works. This paper investigated why they did not exclude translated historical and biographical narratives from the history of modern Korean literature, finding that it was not due to their inner characteristics, but because of the effects of translating them. Translation was an inevitable part of the process of establishing the nation as a modern language community. Historical and biographical narratives were the texts that served this task most faithfully. Since 1905, many historical and biographical narratives have been translated in the form of ‘books’ characterized by expertise, systematicity, and completeness of knowledge. The intensive publication and distribution of Korean texts captured the world for their readers, making a large contribution to the imagination of the language community. In addition, they appeared ‘in large quantities’ and ‘simultaneously’ and were continuously ‘advertised’ through print media. Historical and biographical narratives, which were widely advertised as ‘translation publishing’ strongly evoked one convergence point of the Korean language community. Thus, the history of modern Korean literature began when contemporaries recognized that the Korean language community had been incorporated into the modern world in the contemporary mind. Moreover, the translating subject of historical and biographical narratives paved the way for the translation of world literature and the creation of Korean literature. The independence of the translating subject, which was strengthened by the conditions of relay translation, is also among the characteristic phenomena in the early days of modern Korean literature.