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A Study on Early Translation of Freud’s Works in Korea － With Focus on Sang-chang PAEK’s Theory of Sexual Desire (性慾論) and Yong-ho LEE’s Selected Works (選集) －
Journal of Humanities
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This study examines how the Freudian theory of personality was adopted in Korea and Korean language by reviewing the context of the times when Freud’s works were initially translated into Korean. During the Japanese colonial period of Korea (1910-1945), the theory was only partially introduced by the Japanese academic circles with no translation found yet. After the Korean War (1950-1953), translation of Freud’s works started to be published in earnest with Sang-chang PAEK’s Theory of Sexual Desire (性慾 論, 1956) and Yong-ho LEE’s Selected Works (選集, 1958-1972) as the notable outcomes. Both translations could represent what kind of purpose had Koreans with regard to the theory at that time. The former, PAEK’s translation (especially the selection of Freud’s papers) seems to have focused much on a medicinal purpose, considering the career of the translator as a psychiatrist. On the other hand, the latter, LEE’s translation was aimed at meeting the demand of the general readers who were interested in the theory itself or arts (especially literature) as well as social and cultural theories. This can be regarded as an important feature in the reception history of the Freudian theory in Korea considering that a similar trend still continues to exist as well. From this context, the acceptance of Freud in the early 1950s was the origin of the aspects of the present reception and it shows the general forms of usages in the Freudian theory which were constructed historically. On the aspect of translation, the research randomly chose original (German) and English, Japanese, and Korean texts and compared the translated texts with them, in order to investigate the source language. Unlike translators’ claims that their respective books had been translated from original German or English texts, their translations were estimated to have been the retranslations based on Japanese translations. It can be interpreted that they did not mention the source texts correctly, due to the possible conflict resulting from the anti-Japanese sentiments in society after the liberation of Korea and the reliance of the domestic academic field on the Japanese counterpart at that time. And the terms, which would be the basis of human thoughts, were directly imported from Japan as well. (Most of the terms are still used nowadays.) In conclusion, the early translations of Freud’s works in Korea still remained in the magnetic field of Japan and Japanese language, even though they gained independence and established sovereignty: This can be viewed as a broad landscape of the academic activities in the 1950s in Korean society.
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