‘번역’을 둘러싼 제국일본과 식민지조선의 정치학: 1940년대 일본에 소개된 조선소설을 중심으로

Abstract

Every empire employs policies to dominate its people of colony and assimilate them to its culture, but the people of colony sometimes make a reverse use of imperial power with a view to revealing their own aesthetics and specificity. In this process, there is a room of cultural conflict between empire and colony. In 1940’s, literary people of Chosun considered Japanese translation activity as a good opportunity to introduce modern Korean literature to overseas, and employed textual translations to reveal original privilege of Korean language or highlighted the dignity of Korean literature in an effort to resist mainstream discourses of imperial Japan. On the other hand, Tokyo’s literary world recognized translation as a run-up process toward literary creation in national language(Japanese). From the perspectives of imperial Japan, Korean literature was just a literature that must be assimilated to Japanese one. However, Chosun took different positions. Even when a Japanese version of Korean literary work was published as a separate volume in Japan in 1943, modern Korean literary people still maintained uniqueness of Korean literature but revealed their desires to reach out to overseas literary world viaTokyo. Nevertheless, in a place without any mechanism called ‘translation’ to maintain equal cultural positions, it was not easy to emphasize aesthetic and cultural specificity of Korean literature. Chosun’s literary people had to still seek for original privilege and dig-nity of Korean literature till they met national liberation of Korea.