‘譯述’의 번역관습과 근대적 번역관습의 충돌 ― 1930년대 초 梁白華의 「阿Q正傳」 번역과 그에 대한 반응

Abstract

Around 1930, an unprecedented number of the Chinese New Culture Movement’s and Lu Xun’s literary works were introduced in Korea. The greatest reason lay in the existence of a group of scholars such as Yang Baek-hwa, Kim Tae-jun and Chong Nae-dong who were able to translate and critique the New Culturalists’ writings. Moreover, Korea’s interest in China’s New Culture Movement was heightened by the situational similarity between Chinese literary circles, which was going through radical changes as “revolutionary literature (proletarian literature)” rose to the mainstream, and Korean literary circles, where the ideological dispute was unfolding around proletarian literature. Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q (A Q zhengzhuan), translated by Yang Baek-hwa and published in Chosun Ilbo in January 1930, received particular interest from readers. Widely known around the world as the representative work of Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q was finally introduced to the Korean public through Yang’s translation. However, it is notable that Yang’s rendering of The True Story of Ah Q was a secondhand translation of a Japanese translation. Yang based his own Korean adaptation of The True Story of Ah Q on Inoue Kobai’s translation which Yang discovered by chance in the Japanese magazine Kitan, but Inoue’s Japanese-language rendition had numerous errors. Judging that a Korean translation of The True Story of Ah Q was urgently needed, Yang used the Japanese version as soon as he found it, not realizing that Inoue’s work had serious mistranslations which naturally caused the first Korean translation of the work to be full of errors. Consequently Chong Nae-dong, who studied China’s New Culture Movement in Beijing, scathingly criticized Yang’s The True Story of Ah Q with a line-by-line comparison of the original. Yang Baek-hwa, however, called his translation of The True Story of Ah Q a “paraphrase”, implying that it was a secondhand translation of a Japanese-language translation, as was the translating custom of the early 20th century modern enlightenment period. By contrast, Chong Nae-dong who studied in China in the late 1920s, was used to the modern translating custom of staying faithful to the “original text.” Therefore, Yang’s secondhand translation and Chong‘s criticism of the mistranslation was an ideological conflict between the custom of “paraphrase” translation (which included “secondhand translation”) and modern translating customs. Perhaps Chong’s scathing criticism of Yang‘s mistranslation was an essential occurrence in the conversion from the translating custom of paraphrasing toward modern translating customs. Although Lu Xun and his works were actively introduced and critiqued in Korea around 1930, they lost the moral and material foundation for further development with the reinforced political and ideological control of the Japanese colonial authorities which brought about the dissolution of the KAPF and the inclusion of Lu Xun’s works in the prohibitory index among other steps. As a result, the sound translation of Lu Xun’s works only happened with Korea’s liberation in 1945. The 1946 publication of Lu Xun’s Short Stories (Volumes 1 and 2) by Kim Kwang-ju and Yi Yong-gyu, both of whom studied in China, heralded the first systematic translation of Lu Xun’s works in Korea. In particular, The True Story of Ah Q was translated by Kim Kwang-ju based on the “original text” and in a relatively sophisticated Korean style, at once overcoming the problems of Yang’s second-hand translation and mistranslation.