번역이라는 고투(苦鬪)의 시간 - 염상섭의 번역과 초기 소설의 문체 변화

Abstract

This research examines the original works and translations of Western novels by Korean writer Yom Sang-seop(廉想涉, 1897–1963) to show how the change of style in his novels in the 1920s was deeply influenced by his experience as a translator. As seen in the trilogy written in his early days, Yom’s sentences in his earlier novels featured heavy usage of words written in Chinese characters, even compared to other up-and-coming writers at that time, among whom the use of such words was prevalent. However, his style went through a drastic change. The novel Sunflower, which was his first novel written solely in native Korean without any Chinese characters, seems to have emerged due to the media condition as a series in the Dong-A Ilbo. However, we also need to understand the author’s concurrent effort to pioneer his own novel language in order to understand this stylistic change. Before writing Sunflower, Yom had expanded the boundaries of the Joseon (Korean) language by translating three Western novels. These translations used significantly fewer words in Chinese characters than original novels written in Korea at that time, which likely influenced Yom’s own original style. As this study shows, he moved from the use of the gender-neutral third-person pronoun “彼(he)” to the use of “그(he)”, a change which represents a break from the stylistic influence of Japanese novels and which appeared first in his translation of the novel Four days(四日間) instead of Teacher E(E先生), as has previously been understood. Furthermore, Yom learned the present-tense first-person narrative technique used in the process of adapting Graveyard(墓地) to Mansejeon(萬歲前) through his experience translating Meeting(密會). From the perspective of bringing novelty to the vocabulary of one’s mother language, translation is located at the extreme opposite position from censorship, which blocks the same act. However, from the perspective of language, translation is an endless task of self-censorship. Translation forces the translator to distance himself from his own language under the demands of an external criterion, namely the original text. Thus, when Yom Sang-seop found impure elements in Joseon-language novels, he parted from them without hesitation. Obviously, this may not have been an easy process, and for Yom, in fact, translation was a process of struggle. However, it was this struggle that allowed him to rediscover the Joseon language and establish the style of his novel.