문화번역의 정치성

• 영문명: Politics of Cultural Translation: the Emancipation of Foreignness and Becoming Neighbors
• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: 이명호(Myung Ho Lee)
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제15권 1호, 233~250쪽, 전체 18쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2010.06.30

영문 초록

This paper aims to explore political and ethical possibilities of cultural translation overcoming the limits of multiculturalism and universalism through a reading of Walter Benjamin’s argument on translation. Unlike translation limited to linguistic conversion of one language to another, cultural translation can be defined as an active process of interpreting and transforming other cultures in a specific historical context; it is neither an equivalent exchange of meanings between different cultural texts nor a mediation of meanings from a transcendental position. Benjamin’s theorization of translation is productive in that it frees translation from a parasite on the original and allows it an autonomous position because what the translator aspires to translate is not the original but what he calls “pure language,” an unrepresentable “Idea” and “potentiality” inherent in but not reducible to the original. Unlike poststructuralist interpretation of Benjamin’s pure language as just a rhetorical operation of language with no tie to history, I argue that translation is a political act of emancipating the potential meaning repressed and unrealized in the original. Homi Bhabha’s reading of translation as a performative act of deconstructing both the native and immigrant cultures and emancipating the foreignness in the “inbetween” space of the migrant is a postcolonial appropriation of Benjamin’s translation. Transforming Bhabha’s argument, I attempt to define translation as a process of becoming neighbors to other cultures, which requires a traumatic dispossession of one’s own narcissistic ego and facing the uncanny.

목차

1. 벤야민의 번역론과 문화번역

2. 원천과 성좌: 순수언어의 번역가능성과 불가능성

3. 죽음에서 생존과 해방으로

4. 혼종적 문화번역: 혼성의 지대에서 수행되는 이국성의 해방

5. 외상적 인접성과 ‘이웃’의 문화

키워드

문화번역 번역 벤야민 순수언어 외상적 인접성 이웃 잠재성 혼종 cultural translation translation Walter Benjamin pure language traumatic proximity neighbor potentiality hybrid