책상 옆 도서관

 
나도 번역을 딱 한번 해보았지만 정말 힘들고 고된 작업이다. 노벨문학상의 받은 공로의 반은 번역가에게 있을 지도 모르겠다. 그래서 한국 이름이 금보라라는 데보라 스미스의 서문이 궁금해졌다. 서툴지만 《소년이 온다》 영문판 《HUMAN ACTS》 서문을 번역한 것이다.
 
In early 1980, South Korea was a heap of dry tinder waiting for a spark. Only a few months previously Park Chung-hee, the military strongman who'd ruled since his coup in 1961, had been assassinated by the director of his own security services. Presiding over the so-called Miracle on the Han River - South Korea's rapid transformation from dirt-poor and war-shattered into a fully industrialized economic powerhouse - ad gained Park support from some quarters, though numerous human rights abuses meant he was never truly popular. Recently, he'd succumbed to the classic authoritarian temptation to institute increasingly repressive measures, including scrapping the old constitution and having a new one drawn up making his rule a de facto dictatorship. By 1979 things were fraying at the edges, and Park's declaration of martial law in response to demonstrations in the far south was, to some, a sign that something had to give.

1980년이 시작할 무렵, 대한민국은 불꽃이 튀기만을 기다리는 마른 부싯돌과 같았다. 불과 몇 달 전, 1961년 쿠데타 이후 집권한 군사 독재자 박정희가 자신을 따르던 중앙정보부장에 의해 암살당했기 때문이다. 전쟁과 가난으로 폐허가 된 대한민국을 완전한 산업화 경제 강국으로 빠르게 변화시킨, 이른바 ‘한강의 기적’을 이끈 박정희는 일부분에게는 지지받았지만, 수많은 인권 침해로 진정한 인기를 얻지는 못했다. 암살당하기 얼마 전에는 기존 헌법을 폐기하고 새로운 헌법을 만들어 사실상 독재 체제를 구축하는 등 점점 더 억압적인 조처를 하는 전형적인 권위주의적 유혹에 굴복했다. 1979년이 되자 상황은 점점 나빠졌고, 박정희가 남부 지역의 시위에 대응하려고 계엄령을 선포한 것은 어떤 사람들에게는 무언가를 해야 한다는 신호로 받아들여졌다.

But the assassination was no victory for democracy. Instead, into Park's place stepped his protégé Chun Doo-wan, another army general with firm ideas on how a people should be governed. By May Chun had used the excuse of rumored North Korean infiltration to expand martial law to the entire country, closing universities, banning political activities, and further curtailing the freedom of the press. After almost two decades of Park Chung-hee, South Korean citizens recognized a dictator when they saw one. In the southern city of Gwangju, student demonstrations had their numbers swelled by those for whom the country's "miraculous" industrialization had meant backbreaking work in hazardous conditions, and for whom recent unionization had led to greater political awareness. Paratroopers were sent in to take over from the police, but their brutality against unarmed citizens resulted in a still greater turnout in support of the civil militias. Together, they managed a brief respite during which the army retreated from the city center.

하지만 암살은 민주주의의 승리가 아니었다. 대신 박정희의 자리에 국민을 어떻게 통치해야 하는지에 대한 확고한 생각을 가진 또 다른 육군 장군이자 박정희를 따르던 전두환이 나타났다. 5월이 되자 전두환은 북한의 침투 소문을 핑계로 계엄령을 전국으로 확대하였고, 대학을 폐쇄하고, 정치 활동을 금지하고, 언론의 자유를 더 축소했다. 거의 20년 동안이나 이어진 박정희 집권 이후, 한국 시민들은 독재자가 나타나면 그가 독재자라는 걸 금방 알아차렸다. 남부 도시 광주에서는 한국의 '기적적인' 산업화로 위험한 환경에서 고된 노동에 시달리고, 최근 노조 결성으로 정치적 의식이 높아진 사람들이 학생 시위에 대거 참여했다. 경찰을 대신해 공수부대 병력이 투입되었지만, 비무장 시민을 잔인하게 진압하면서 오히려 시민 민병대를 지지하는 사람들이 더 많아졌다. 이들은 군대가 도심에서 후퇴하는 동안 잠시 숨을 돌릴 수 있었다.

Shoot-outs, heroism, David and Goliath - this is the Gwangju Uprising as it has already been told in countless films, and a lesser writer might have been tempted to start with such superficially gripping tropes. Han Kang starts with bodies. Piled up, reeking, unclaimed, and thus unburied, they present both a logistical and an ontological dilemma. The alternation in the original between words whose meanings shade from "corpse" or "dead body" to "dead person" or simply "body" reflects a status of uncertainty reminiscent of Antigone, In the Korean context, such issues can also be connected to animist beliefs and the idea of somatic integrity-that violence done to the body is a violation of the spirit/soul that animates it. In Gwangju, part of the magnitude of the crime was that the violence done to these bodies, and the manner in which they had been dumped or hidden away, meant they were unable to be identified and given the proper burial rites by their families.

이 이야기는 총격전, 영웅주의, 다윗과 골리앗 등 이미 수없이 많은 영화에서 다뤄진 광주항쟁의 이야기이다. 서툰 작가라면 겉으로 드러난 주의를 끄는 비유로 시작하고 싶었을지도 모른다. 하지만 한강은 시체에서 시작한다. 여기저기 쌓여 있고, 악취가 나고, 주인을 찾지 못한 채 묻히지 못한 시신은 어디론가 옮겨야 할지, 내버려두어야 할지 딜레마에 빠지게 한다. 원작에서 '시체' 또는 '시신'에서 '죽은 사람' 또는 단순히 '몸'을 의미하는 단어들이 번갈아 등장하는 건 안티고네를 연상시키는 어떻게 해야 할 지 모르는 상황을 반영하며, 한국의 전통문화에서 이러한 문제는 시신에 가해지는 폭력은 신체를 움직이는 정신혼에 대한 폭력이라는 민간신앙의 믿음과 신체 완전성과도 연결될 수 있다. 광주에서는 시신에 가해진 폭력과 시신이 버려지거나 숨겨지는 방식으로 시신의 신원을 확인할 수 없었고, 가족들이 지내야 할 장례 의식을 치를 수 없었다는 점이 가장 큰 범죄의 심각성 중 하나였다.

The novel is equally unusual in delve ing into the complex background of the democratization movement, though Han Kang's style is always to do this obliquely, through the experiences of her characters, rather than presenting a dry historical account. There is the class element, much of which floats beneath the surface of the novel, because the recently unionized factory girls were some of the most vocal and visible agitators for change, the authorities were able to paint the uprising as a Communist plot sparked by North Korean spies, thus legitimizing their brutal crackdown.  In the chapter entitled "The Prisoner, 1990," I paid special attention to diction in the hope that this would highlight the subtle politics of a working-class torture survivor being pressured into revisiting traumatic memories for the sake of a university professor's academic thesis. And there is also gender politics, with "The Factory Girl, 2002," featuring a women-only splinter group from the main union, set up to address the fact that female workers were treated more unfairly even than the men.

이 소설은 민주화 운동의 복잡한 배경을 찾아보는 방법도 이례적이지만, 소설가 한강은 항상 건조한 역사 이야기를 서술하기보다는 등장인물의 경험을 통해 비스듬히 말해준다. 소설의 표면 아래에는 계급사회의 요소가 많이 깔려 있는데, 당시 노조를 만든 공장 여공들이 사회변화를 위해 가장 목소리를 높이고 눈에 띄는 선동가였기 때문에 당국은 이 항쟁을 북한 간첩이 일으킨 공산주의 음모로 꾸며서 잔인한 탄압을 정당화하였다. '1990년 죄수'라는 내용에서는 대학교수의 학술 논문을 위해 트라우마 기억을 되살려야 한다는 압박을 받는 노동계급인 고문 생존자의 미묘한 정치성을 강조하기 위해 문장에 특별히 주의를 기울였다. 또한 여성 노동자들이 남성보다 부당한 대우를 받는다는 사실을 알리기 위해 설립한 노조의 여성 분파가 등장하는 '공장 소녀, 2002'와 같은 성차별에 관한 정치도 있다.

Another striking feature of the uprising is regionalism. It was no accident that the first rumblings, and the worst violence, were felt in the far south of the Korean peninsula, a region that has a long history of political dissent, and of underrepresentation in the central government. It also goes some way in explaining why the uprisings were suppressed with such brutality, and why the government was able to cover up the precise details and statistics of this suppression for so long. It wasn't until 1997 that the massacre was officially memorialized, and casualty figures remain a contentious issue even today. Disputing the official figures was initially punishable by arrest and, despite being far lower than the estimates by foreign press, these have still not been revised. In terms of mentality if not geography, Gwangju was sufficiently far from Seoul to seem "off the mainland" - the same kind of mental distance as that from London to Northern Ireland at the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre.

이번 항쟁의 또 다른 두드러진 점은 지역감정이다. 오랜 정치적 반대의 역사와 중앙 정부에서 소외된 지역인 한반도 최남단에서 최초의 항의와 최악의 폭력 사태가 발생한 것은 결코 우연이 아니었다. 또한 왜 그토록 잔인하게 봉기가 진압되었는지, 그리고 왜 정부가 그토록 오랫동안 진압의 정확한 내용과 통계를 은폐할 수 있었는지 설명하는 데도 도움이 된다. 1997년에서야 공식적으로 학살을 추모하기 시작했고, 현재까지도 사상자 수에 대한 논란은 계속되고 있다. 공식 수치에 이의를 제기하면 처음에는 체포될 수도 있었고, 외신에서 추정한 수치보다 훨씬 낮았음에도 불구하고 여전히 수정되지 않고 있다. 지리적 거리는 아니더라도 정신적인 측면에서 광주는 서울에서 '본토에서 멀리 떨어진' 것처럼 느껴질 만큼 충분히 멀리 떨어져 있었으며, 이는 피의 일요일 학살 당시 런던에서 북아일랜드까지와 비슷한 정신적 거리였다.

Born and raised in Gwangju, Han Kang's personal connection to the subject matter meant that putting this novel together was always going to be an extremely fraught and painful process. She is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalizing the sorrow and shame that her hometown was made to bear. Her empathy comes through most strongly in "The Boy's Mother, 2010," written in a brick-thick Gwangju dialect impossible to replicate in English, Korean dialects being mainly marked by grammatical differences rather than individual words. To me, "faithfulness" in translation primarily concerns the effect on the reader rather than being an issue of syntax, and so l tried to aim for a nonspecific colloquialism that would carry the warmth Han intended. Though I did smuggle in the tiniest bit of Yorkshire-call it translator's license.

광주에서 태어나고 자란 한강은 이 주제에 대한 개인적인 인연으로 이 소설을 완성하는 과정이 매우 힘들고 고통스러운 과정이 될 수밖에 없었다. 사물을 깊이 마음에 새기는 작가인 그녀는 번역이 원작의 도덕적 양면성을 유지하면서 고향에서 겪어야 했던 슬픔과 고통을 이야깃거리로 묘사하지 않기를 바랐다. 그녀의 공감이 가장 강하게 드러난 작품은 '소년의 어머니, 2010'이다. 영어로는 도저히 흉내 낼 수 없는 벽돌 같은 광주 사투리로 쓰인 이 작품은 개별 단어보다는 주로 문법적 차이로 특징지어지는 한국 방언이 주를 이룬다. 나에게 번역의 '충실성'은 구문의 문제보다는 독자에게 미치는 영향이 더 중요하다고 생각했기 때문에 소설가 한강이 의도한 따뜻함을 담을 수 있는 정해지지 않은 구어체를 따르려고 노력했다. ‘번역가의 면허증’이라고 할 수 있는 요크셔 사투리를 살짝 섞긴 했다.

One of this translation's working titles was Uprisings. As well as the obvious connection to the Gwangju Uprising itself, a thread of words runs through the novel - come out, come forward, emerge, surface, rise up - which suggests an uprising of another kind. The past, like the bodies of the dead, hasn't stayed buried. Repressed trauma erupts in the form of memory, one of the main Korean words for 'to remember" meaning literally "to rise to the surface"-an inadvertent, often hazy recollection that is the type of memory most common in Han Kang's book. Here, chronology is a complex weave, with constant slippages between past and present, giving the sense of the former constantly intruding on or shadowing the atter. Paragraph breaks and subheadings have been inserted into the translation in order to maintain these shifts in tense without confusing the reader.

이 번역의 작업 제목 중 하나는 '봉기(Uprising)'였다. 광주항쟁 자체와 명백한 연관성뿐만 아니라, 소설을 관통하는 일련의 단어들 – 밖으로 나오다, 앞으로 나서다, 드러나다, 들고 일어나다 - 은 또 다른 항쟁을 암시한다. 죽은 자의 시신처럼 과거는 묻혀 있지 않는다. 억압된 트라우마는 기억의 형태로 분출되는데, '기억이 떠오른다'라는 한국어는 말 그대로 '수면 위로 떠오른다'라는 뜻으로, 한강 작가의 책에서 가장 흔하게 등장하는 기억의 유형인 우연처럼 종종 나타나는 흐릿한 기억이다. 여기서 연대기란 과거와 현재 사이에 끊임없이 미끄러지는 복잡한 직조로, 전자가 후자를 끊임없이 침범하거나 그림자를 드리우는 듯한 느낌을 준다. 독자에게 혼란을 주지 않고 시제의 변화를 유지하기 위해 번역본에 단락 나누기와 부제목을 삽입했다.

In 2013, when Park Chung-hee's daughter Park Geun-hye was inaugurated as president, the past rose up and ripped the bandage off old wounds for Gwangju-ites like Han Kang. Her novel, then, is both a personal and political response to these recent developments, and a reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime.

박정희의 딸 박근혜가 대통령에 취임한 2013년, 과거는 한강을 비롯한 광주 시민들의 오래된 상처에서 붕대를 풀었고, 기억이 떠올랐다. 그때 그녀의 소설은 이러한 최근의 상황에 대한 개인적이고 정치적인 대응이자, 잔인함과 연약함, 비열함과 숭고함, 우리가 모두 할 수 있는 인간의 행위(Human Acts)를 상기시키는 작품이다.

Debora Smith 데보라 스미스