『노르웨이의 숲 』의 번역에 대하여

On the Translation of Norwegian Wood - Focusing on Iterated-Rhythms of Sentences -

In this article, we target Haruki Murakami’s steadily-selling book Norwegian Wood, a piece of work where the rhythm of sentences plays an important role, and analyze five translations by comparing them in terms of how the “rhythm” is reflected in each translation. As far as the iteration rhythm is concerned, none of these translations sufficiently reflects the author’s intention, and this article offers an explanation of this observed fact. The reasons for the above fact include “the translator did not recognize the rhythm intended by the author,” “the translator put a priority on a translation that naturally matches the Korean language over a translation that reflects the sentence rhythm,” and so on. Another reason would be “it is sometimes awkward to frequently iterate phrases/sentences in the Korean language.” The main results of the present article can be summed up as follows: (i) The article addresses the iteration rhythm in Haruki Murakami’s work for the first time, shedding light on the characteristics of his style; (ii) A new direction is pointed out for the translations of Haruki Murakami’s work; (iii) Words and phrases which resist the application of sentence rhythm are presented, which broadens the understanding of the Japanese language.