(불)가능한 글쓰기, 번역: (부)적절한 번역의 아름다움

Abstract

This paper suggests translation as a creative transformation of which the beauty is not represented in perfection but found among flaws and unfamiliarity. Walter Benjamin in the early twentieth century says “it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language”; and Jacques Derrida in the later half of the century echoes his precursor describing translation as “a word that will also be more beautiful.” Although their purposes of theoretical discourses may differ, they both agree that translation is never something fixed and frigid: it is “a mode” which flows and transforms. Therefore there is no final form but only successive process toward new, alien, plural, and even chaotic (Babelian) worlds of language. Translation is impossible without improper mistakes which leaves space for afterlife. D. H. Lawrence as a translator deserves rather mixed reputation not only because of his dare challenge to transform the original but also his unconscious and inadvertant mistakes. However there are moments in his translation where infidelity turns out to be a deliberate attempt to highlight and reveal secretive truth hidden and forgotten in the original. His translation theory and practice are rarely direct main subjects in his major works but his art on the whole may well be interpreted as a series of translation, a creative transformation from the old to the new, and from the familiar to the alien. “Wintry Peacock,” one of Lawrence’s short stories in England, My England (1922), has hardly been a site to discuss discourses on translation, perhaps beguiled by easily mistakable misogynous elements described as “witch-like” femininity and blatant male infidelity. However this story is worth exploring the unexpected multiple layers of surprises coded in translation. The story introduces a first-person narrator whose deliberate mis-translation becomes the key to challenging the hierarchical establishment of language, class and society. How hopelessly dismal the human world in the story may remain, it is the improper translation that reveals the truth, the ever-new transformation that is impossible to finish.