이상의 언어횡단 - 성천 관련 글과 일본어 초고의 문제를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem concerning the existence of manuscripts written in Japanese by Yi Sang, who wrote mainly in Korean during his lifetime. A note which contains the Japanese manuscripts of Yi Sang was found in 1960, and since then, they had been introduced to Korean public through translation until 1980s. However, the original manuscripts in Japanese have never been published and there has been few detailed analyses on the Japanese expressions in them because of such situations. This paper examines Yi Sang’s travel writings on Seongcheon, “Lingering Impressions of a Mountain Village” and “Ennui” alongside with their manuscripts, paying attention toward his cross-linguistic writing process. Although the note itself is now lost, I tried to reconstruct the original texts in Japanese from the photocopies of the note, if possible. In his first travel writing in Korean, “Lingering Impressions of a Mountain Village,” the village is represented through numerous “urban” words and expressions. These expressions are thought to seek to make up an interpretative community of urban residents, while prefiguring the impossibility of such a community. On the other hand, “Ennui,” which was written in Tokyo, displays the complicated writing act between the colony and the empire, the Japanese and Korean languages. By objectifying the ‘watashi (I)’ in the manuscripts in Japanese and showing the position of Korean ‘na (I)’ in Tokyo, it describes the presence of ‘na’ in the “extreme of ennui,” which is different from the self-consciousness of modernity. Yi Sang’s cross-linguistic writing process is considered to have been a way of realizing the domain of the Korean language as a method of representation through the foreign lanugage of Japanese.