국내 중동문학의 번역 상황 고찰: 아랍 문학을 중심으로, 1970년대 초부터 2011년 5월까지

Abstract

This research aimed at surveying the literary works of the Middle Eastern countries which have been translated into Korean for the past about forty years since the early 1970s, and studying the course of that translation. The fact that history of translation of foreign literary works in Korea started by an adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights in 1895, demonstrates that the Middle Eastern literature has been given a great deal of weight in world literature. Importation of the Middle Eastern literary works into Korea in the 1970s had its limits in that the translation has been conducted by non-specialists in the Middle Eastern languages, who translated them from English, French, or Japanese. My survey shows that Selection of Arab short stories translated by Song Kyong Sook from Arabic in 1984 is considered the first Korean translation from an original text of the Middle Eastern literature. In the 1990s, some Korean universities have turned out specialists in Arabic, Turkish and Iranian, who tried to translate several literary works, mostly classical works and modern novels. With regard to the translation movement of Arabic literature, I found: first, Arabic classical literary works have been translated constantly, and there is necessity to search for a new list of such ones; second, the translation of modern literary works have been concentrated regionally in Egypt and Palestine, so we should seek balanced translation between 22 Arab countries; third, in selecting literary works to translate we have taken into consideration name value of writer, importance of writings, and timeliness of works, and this criteria for selection is still available.