통역/번역되는 냉전의 언어와 영문학자의 위치- 1945~1953년, 설정식의 경우를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the linguistic field of the Cold War within the context of the translation/interpretation regime through a case study of Sul Chung Sik (Sŏl Chŏng-sik). Sul majored in English literature in the United States prior to Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule and was employed during the immediate post-liberation period as a government official, author, and translator. After “going north” (wŏlbuk), he also interpreted for North Korea during the ceasefire talks. In this paper, I go beyond the existing scholarship on Sul that has focused him primarily as a poet and attempt to reconstruct the complex and unstable status of the English literature scholar who understood English as both a literary and political language that established the cultural-linguistic situation of the post-liberation period. Then, by examining works of fiction and memoir concerning Sul, I explore the ways in which the gaps between political, intellectual and cultural positions were sutured with the rhetoric of “the problematic individual” or “the middle faction.” The fiction of Matsumoto Seichou, which restaged the North Korean trial of the South Korean Labor Party, portrays Sul as an ambivalent agent of the Cold War by positioning him as someone “hard to trust” and brings into sharp relief Chosŏn's political situation of post-liberation in which one could not easily differentiate between enemy and comrade. In Ch'oe Tae-ŭng's memoirs, he describes Sul as a member of the “middle faction” (as a “gray”), but even as he emphasized that Sul was not a spy for the USAMGIK, this clarification functioned to address the problematic fact that Sul had gone north. Ch'oe hypothesizes that because Sul's English abilities were mobilized in service of Chosŏn's political situation, it led to the destruction of “literature for oneself.” This account shows that even in the 1960s, the perception that “English” and “English language literature” could not co-exist persisted. Meanwhile, Sul's final public activity was interpreting for the representatives of the People's Army during the ceasefire talks. Tibor Meray's memoir, which remains one of the most important official documents on Sul, shows how important his performativity as the interpreter had been within the oppressive and hostile context of the Cold War. By reading the records of the ceasefire talks Sul participated in alongside the memoirs regarding Sul, my paper shows how one of the key characteristics of Cold War communication was that it had to occur via translation/interpretation, thereby calling our attention to the performativity of the interpreter—the subject who reminds us of the countless points of discontinuities concealed therein.