‘젠더번역’ 관점에서의 최윤 소설-최윤, 「회색 눈사람」을 중심으로

Abstract

Grey Snowman written by Choi Yoon, depicts the process of Kang Ha-won, a female college student who starts to help the activities of an underground anti-government movement group called the Cultural Revolution Association, and gradually feels distanced from the organization. In addition to the fact that another female character, Kim Hee-jin, is eventually found as a starving corpse, this is a novel that describes the frustration and pain of those who have been ‘alienated’ from movements and ideologies in a delicate style and also evaluated as a novel that previously indicates the wounded women who should be ‘mourned’. In her relationship with ‘Ahn’, the owner of the printing factory that serves as the base of the Revolutionary Association, and ‘Hee-jin’, who escaped to her room for twenty days due to the intensified crackdown, it can be said Ha-won, and also Gray Snowman have been interpreted. With a different focus, this paper re-reads Gray Snowman, paying renewed attention to the trail of the narrator, Kang Ha-won, who is reflecting on herself in twenty years ago. At this time, we can see that she keeps concentrating on translation of ‘German history book by an Italian historian’, however, she repeats a failure to get through half a page and gets exhausted every time. In short, the situation in which Ha-won continues to try to translate, or in other words, keeps almost being failed to complete the translation, it is a practical act of doubting and denying the ‘possibility of translating the original text’ and embodies the ‘politics of untranslatability’. That is, from the perspetive of gender- translation, it is captured Ha-won’s appearance that indicates the powerlessness of the ‘originality’ of the book, which is described as containing the core of socialist ideology within the movement organization – what ‘Ahn’ is trying to mass-produce in his printing factory. This kind of perspective is also in line with the consciousness of writer Choi Yoon, who regards her novel as a ‘message’ toward history. It also provides an answer to the question why Kang Ha-won in the present emphasizes that she is feeling none other than ‘relief.’