World Literature Imagined Otherwise:Translocating the Tale of Genji in Korea

초록

World Literature Imagined Otherwise: Translocating the Tale of Genji in Korea Against the backdrop of the conceptualization of world literature and its link to the reception history of The Tale of Genji in the West, this paper investigates the same issue from a different geopolitical location, South Korea, in which the critical imagination of the global and world literature is inflected by the postcoloniality of Asia vis-à-vis the West overall and by that of Korea vis-à-vis Japan in particular. Specifically, this paper analyzes the production and consumption of Genji Iyagi, the Korean translation of The Tale of Genji, which has undergone three iterations within the past four decades—the earliest one by Yu Jeong (1975), the second one by Jeon Yongsin (1999), and the third one by Kim Nanju (2007). Each iteration—employing a different set of translation strategies—carries the imprints of Korea’s national ethos of the time, which was in itself a crystallization of the complex negotiations that Korea undertook to advance its nation-building project, a project that necessitated an economic alliance with Japan, while forging new Korean national identities for the domestic and international stages. This study illuminates how Korea’s imbrication within the world order since the late nineteenth century has effected the very use of such categories as national and world literatures in Korea as a constitutive means of the nation’s self-fashioning, assimilation, and resistance vis-à-vis the hegemonic world order. This has in turn complicated the enterprise of translocating Japanese literary works such as The Tale of Genji in Korea as an instance of either foreign literature or world literature, although Korea’s changed self-perception as a key global player in the last two decades has begun to alter the terms of cultural negotiation with Japan and other major polities worldwide.