번역, 이산 여성주체의 이언어적 받아쓰기—테레사 학경 차의『딕테』

Abstract

This paper aims to read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, focusing on the translating activity across different languages and cultures. Sakai Naoki’s definition of translation as the act of heterolingual address to others in different cultural and linguistic communities opens the way of thinking seriously of “disjunctive” moments in the performance of translation. Translation in this sense is not a transparent communication of meaning between source and target languages but a cultural practice of making differences through repetition, thereby deconstructing the myth of national language as pure, homogeneous, and complete. Dictee is a work that interrogates the meaning of translation performed by a Korean American female immigrant subject. The novel depicts a Korean American immigrant girl’s attempt to learn English through dictation, a process of learning foreign language that one mimics its speech without meaning anything. A speech act without meaning makes dictation similar to translation, usually understood as a mechanical transfer of words and sentences from one language to another without the translater’s active work. Translation as a hybrid cultural practice, however, is not a mechanical movement without the subject’s transformation; neither is it a one-sided assimilation into the target language nor a return to the source language, but a perpetual motion of search for new meaning in the “in-between” space of the two languages, transforming the subject itself. This paper attempts to read this hybrid translation as a strategy through which a Korean American female creates diasporic subjective space, irreducible either to dominant American culture or to Korean nationalist culture. Dictee remembers and collects the traces of female subjects across East and West cultures, erased in the dominant patriarchal history, and constructs a female genealogy from mothers to daughters.