『허삼관』은 어떻게 『허삼관 매혈기』를 ‘한국 영화’로 번역하(지 못하)는가? ― 한중 비교연구의 조건들에 대하여

Abstract

The film Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, which is made by Korean filmmaker Ha Jungwoo in 2015, is based on Chinese novelist Yu Hua’s 1995 novel of the same title. At a distance of 20 years time, the characters, events, and backgrounds of the Chinese novel have been adapted for the ‘Korean film.’ When a ‘Chinese novel’ is transferred to a ‘Korean film,’ how does the historical, social, and cultural differences between China and Korea be dealt with in these two different media? This paper attempts to explore the problematic of ‘translation’ through a comparative study between a ‘Chinese novel’ and a ‘Korean film’ with the same title of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Roman Jacobson classifies the linguistic aspects of translation into three categories, which are intralingual translation, interlingual translation, and intersemiotic translation. First, as a text of translation, the film Chronicle of a Blood Merchant includes interlingual translation. Translating Chinese text into Korean one, the film changes the novel’s theme of ‘equality’ into the narrative of ‘father.’ For instance, while the novel employs the historical background of the Cultural Revolution to emphasize the theme of ‘equality,’ the film focuses only to the relationship between father and son by erasing the specific historical context. Besides, unlike the novel, the film shows mother’s sacrifice in the ending part to concentrate on the patriarchal system based on blood ties. To translate novel into film, which Jacobson calls a intersemiotic translation, necessarily entails not only the adaptation of the narrative but also the visualization of the characters, backgrounds, and moods described in the novel. In this process, the film reveals the unwritten of the novel in a cinematic way, which thus constructs the specificity of the film medium itself. The film Chronicle of a Blood Merchant translates the novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant into the Korean landscape right after the Korean War, and interrogates how the Korean is inscribed in the film. In this respect, the comparative study between Chinese and Korean texts of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant means how China and Korea encounter the nation-building project of modernization after the national war respectively. However, it might includes the contemporary positions to translate the 1950s and 1960s narrative described in 1995 from the perspective of 2015. Ever since 1989 Tiananmen movement, the depoliticization of China, as Wang Hui argues, has accelerated. And it is not only a Chinese national phenomenon, but also a worldwide tide. In this trend, when a canon novel of the 1990s is translated into a commercial film of the 2010s, history is erased and politics is missing. The film Chronicle of a Blood Merchant exploits the past time to highlight fathers who represent successful narratives in Korea 2015. In other words, when the novel is translated into the film, ‘equality’ vanishes and ‘father’ remains. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin argues that “there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” Thus, what it means that we translate the past is not to erase and deny the failures and traces of the past for the winners of the present, but to respond ceaselessly with and redeem the dead of the past, because translation is not to simply deliver the meanings, but to act to address the others.