쓰여진 것과 말해진 것-‘異重’ 언어 글쓰기에 나타난 통역, 대화, 고유명

Abstract

Ecriture (roundtables, speeches, conversations, and translations in literary works) in the pre-and post-Liberation displays dissonances between what is written and what is said. The Japanese language was a national language by force in Korea before the Liberation. The Korean and Japanese languages become dominant in their respective countries after the Japanese defeat. Generally, dominant languages efface the linguistic behaviors of other subordinate languages. If we look into the gaps or dissonances between what is written and what is said in the texts, we find out multi-layered linguistic behaviors reflecting social or cultural changes in race, sex, class as well as intra-linguistic changes like written / spoken words, speech forms, registers and so on in the pre-and post-Liberation period. This phenomenon may be called a “bilingual situation.” However, the situation underwent more various and complex processes of fermenting discords and overcoming them than has been suggested so far. So I call it the multi-glossic situation with multi-layeredness and plurality, but not simply a bilingual situation. It produces aspects of (in)translatability, which engender an adjusted and transformed language with unlimited differences from a dominant language. And its generation again makes it (im)possible for the imperial language to (re)emerge. Firstly, the proper name of a bi-lingual writer like Chang Hŏkchu or Kim Saryang written in the Chinese characters is the same in the form, but there were wide differences in pronunciations depending on the speakers and their discoursal situations; for example, following the Korean reading of a Chinese character or the Japanese rendering of a Chinese character. The intermixing of the ways in uttering names is found here and there in the “the Roundtable Talk of Writers from China, Korea and Mongol” written in Korean (Maeil Shinmun, November 17-19, 1942) and the “Roundtable Talk of Representative Writers in Greater East Asian Literary Conference (Rokki, December, 1942) in Japanese, both of which have almost the same in their contents, and editing. In making comparison between the two editions, we find out the possibility that the Korean version, that is, on Maeil Shinmun, was translated from the Japanese one written in the form of shorthand and the possibility that the imperial and dominant language, i.e., Japanese, also underwent a variety of changes in uses, styles, registers and the like, contrary to the imperialist’s intention. Furthermore, the possibilities lead us to have a question whether proper names written in the Chinese characters could be translated completely into the imperial language without distorting their own meaning. Secondly, Kim Saryang (Jp. Kimushiryo) employs diacritics like hiragana over the words uttered or stage directions to describe speeches, translations, and conversations in his novel, Deep into the Grasses. In his novel, we find out the possibilities that both languages, that is, Korean and Japanese, interfered and conflicted with each other, went through gradation in linguistic colors in the binary formatting of imperial language vs. colonized language, Japanese and / or Korean vs. Chinese characters, elites’ language vs. vernacular language, standard language vs. dialect, and sound vs. silence, and finally created a variety of linguistic transformations in words, registers, and grammars. Of course, the colonized language suffered far more drastic changes, but the dominant language was also influenced in a reverse way. The linguistic power relationship was interiorized into the linguistic behavior of minorities and provoked conflicts and splits, which, in turn, produced subtle differences in linguistic behaviors without cease and ironically led to the transformations in the imperial language itself. Thirdly, the Korean language has taken the place of the Japanese language after the Liberation. But the changes in the written Korean after the Liberation reveal that the former did not merely replace the latter in the situation in which both languages were intermixing in the spoken language. Contrary to our expectations, the movement for the abolition of the Chinese characters rose up more strongly than the movement for the banning of Japanese. While the Korean language was becoming dominant, the most threatening was not the use of Japanese in the spoken Korean but the use of the Chinese characters in the written Korean, which exercised more powers in the discousal space. The intertwining and interactions of the Korean language, the Japanese language and the Chinese characters in the spoken and written discoursal spaces are abundantly displayed in the novels in which An Hoenam describes his experiences in the coal mines while he was conscripted there. In Iron Chains Broke (Kaebyŏk, January 1946), An employs complex notations like parentheses, upper dots and the like, which are scattered in the novel, in order to describe the vivid pictures of the conversations which use Korean, Japanese and / or Chinese characters, similar to the case with Kim Saryang (Jp. Kimushiryo). The use of complex notations in the novels shows that Japanese was considered a spoken language and the Chinese characters a written language and also it reveals that both of them were intermixed in common use of the Korean language at the time. Thus far, we have examined the dynamic relations between spoken and written languages or between what is written and what is said in the pre-and post World War II. In the linguistic transformation, we have evaluated the meaning of employing the Chinese characters and the multi-glossic linguistic behaviors which contain linguistic influences from the dominaut languages. The colonized interiorize the imperial language but, simultaneously, they, i.e., the minorities, never cease to create what I call gradation, and develop their multiple linguistic behaviors and potentialities without completely adopting the dominant language.