고전의 역사성과 고전번역의 어려움

Abstract

There seem to be three defining characteristics of being a classic. (1) Universality: Classics deal with universal questions; their value transcends individual societies. (2) Fundamental reflection: Classics do not turn away from the problems of the given society; they rather go deeper to the roots of the problems. (3) Forming the framework of thinking: Classics help people to form and reshape their framework of thinking. And these defining characteristics of classics are sources of special difficulties in translating them.BR Roughly speaking, different languages presuppose different world-views, and this is what makes translation in general a difficult task. But the three characteristics above amplify the difficulties in translating classics. Differences in world-views are more clearly revealed when we are dealing with universal questions. Similarly, fundamental reflections make the differences in world-views more visible. Moreover, fundamental reflections tend to touch on the core of a given world-view, and may cause slight changes in it. Cumulative changes in the world-view result in the change of the framework of thoughts itself. And the changes in the framework of thoughts itself may even cause a change in the grammatical structure of the language. To sum up, classics have historicality, and that makes translation of classics a particularly difficult task.BR I discuss two cases of the difficulties in translating classics: sōphrosunē and third-person imperative. Sōphrosunē was a very important concept in the Greek religion, as embodied in the delphic maxim, “Know thyself”. Plato seems to have reflected fundamentally and continually on this concept. In the Charmides, he takes it as knowledge of what one knows and what one does not know. In the Protagoras, he takes it, in effect, as knowledge of goodness and badness. And in the Republic, he takes it as the agreement between the parts of the soul concerning which part should rule and which part should be ruled. And there is simply no word that can correctly translate sōphrosunē that covers all these conceptions.BR As to the third-person imperative, while there were abundant usages of it in Ancient Greek, the very idea of giving orders to a third-person seems illogical to most of us modern people. But it seems to me that there are third-person imperatives in Korean as well. Although grammarians deny its existence and try to give alternative explanations for sentences that look like third-person imperatives, I argue that there are such sentences that cannot be explained away in that way. The upshot is that you should not translate Greek third-person imperatives automatically as ‘Let X do Y’.