くにざかい[国境·国界], こっきょう[国境]
『유키구니(雪国)』
쇼와 10년(1935)부터 연작의 형태로 발표되어 22년(1947)에 완결되었다. 에치고(越後) 유자와(湯沢)의 자연을 배경으로, 시마무라(島村)라는 남자를 통해 기생 고마코(駒子)의 모습이 서정적으로 아름답게 묘사된 작품이다. 도쿄에서 온 시마무라는 기생인 고마코에게 반하여 때때로 설국의 온천을 방문하지만, 그때뿐인 덧없는 사랑 이상의 관계를 가지려 하지 않는다. 이 차가울 정도로 맑은 시마무라의 비정한 마음과 한결같이 불타오르는 설국의 여정이 얽혀 세상의 아름다움과 애절함을 그려 내고 있다.
[네이버 지식백과] 『유키구니(雪国)』 (일본문학사, 2013. 1. 18., 한국학술정보(주))
1) 国境の長いトンネルを抜けると、雪国であった."
2) The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country."
The first is the the beginning sentence of 'Snow country(雪国)' by Kawabata Yasunari(川端 康成) - the novel which made Kawabata Yasunari the first Nobel prize winner for literature from Japan-, and the second one is the corresponding English translation by Edward G. Seidensticker. Yesterday, I found an interesting comparision (and discussion) on these 2 sentences from a blog post, titled "第 25回 「国境の長いトンネル：コトとモノ」(The 25th - The long tunnel at the province border : Koto and Mono)" in the blog by kanayata Kehiro(金谷 武洋), one of my favorite linguists of the Japanese language and a Japanese instructor teaching in Quebec in Canada. In this post, I'd like to introduce some of it along with my brief comment.
[The URL] : http://blog.goo.ne.jp/shugohairanai/e/3 … 486872d8be
He begins his discussion with pointing out the fact that one gets quite a different mental image from reading the original sentence than that one gets when reading the English translation.
He asks himself a question, "what kind of mental image would one get when reading the original sentence?", and his own answer goes like this.
"When reading the original sentence, It's obvious that the narrator of the sentence is in the train, thus the readers are naturally induced to take the same perpective, the same angle of view as the narraotor. Now, the train is running through the dark and long tunnel, and I(the narrator) is sitting inside the train. Soon, the sight of the outside the window in front of me (the narrator) is beginning to brighten gradually, and when the train comes out of the long tunnel finally, into the view of the narrator(so and the readers also ) comes the sight of the white, snow-white, a silver world. This is the kind of the succession of mental images which comes to the readers's mind when reading the original sentence, and those scenes occuring in the reader's mind keep changing continuosly along with the course of the flow of time."
But, kanayata Kehiro(金谷 武洋) continues, one can never get such mental images from reading the English translation, but only get quite different ones instead.
The below is my own translation of a part of the post.
" I invited several native English speakers to my studio and asked them to draw a picture of the scene which comes to their mind when reading it. Most interestingly, they all drew a picture of the tunnel with an angle(point of view) of looking down from above, and there was no exception. Obviously, the view-point of the narrator (so that of the readers) was "not inside, but outside" the train. "
In my view, He is making a good point about the differences between the two sentences, and in the following part of the post, he also makes a persuasive argument on what makes or accounts for such big differences. [ In a word, No subject in Japanese 
], implying that the corresponding translation failed, at the same time. It might be simply a matter of definition, but if we regard translation of literary works as a work or an attempt to reproduce the meaning and mental images in the target language in such a way that they are as close to those created by the original text as possible, then we might be right to conclude that it is a failed translation (though I have no idea of how to make an improvement).
And, as regards to kanayata's explanation of the causes of the differences, I tend to prfer the account presented in '日本語の視点 ことばを創る日本人の発想' by Morita Yoshiyuki(森田良行), that is, 'Japanese is an extremely speaker-oriented language', and it seems like that it is a more general and foundational account.
Last edited by minue622 (2011-02-09 14:16:39)