Introduction

Multiply‐translated Chaucer in the Korean classroom

“…I suggest ways to make use of translation history for teaching not just translation, but better appreciation and analysis of literature itself, by exploiting the ways in which translation and retranslation combine linguistic, socio‐cultural, and historical dimensions (Gambier, 1994, p. 413). In response to Gail Ashton's call that teachers of Chaucer should “encourage critical responses to [translations] amongst our students” (2007, p. 10), I argue that in the context of the Korean classroom, using multiple Korean translations to teach Chaucer is in fact one of the best ways of encouraging critical responses not just to those translations, but to Chaucer in general. This experiment takes a cue from observations by comparatist scholars such as Eoyang (1993) that “multiple translations of the same work over generations provide directly available clues on the way the literary text was read” (p. 153).…”

“…Students can also use this understanding as a jumping‐off point for a fuller appreciation of the work of Korean writers who were themselves translators, compilers, and poets—such as Choe Nam‐seon, the earliest known Korean translator of Chaucer—and to move beyond thinking of literary derivation and invention in strictly binary terms. In addition, the distance between Chaucer's Middle English and today's Anglophone linguistic context means that not only does Chaucer's text already have a history of transmission and translation attached to it within its own language, it also does not have any “native” readers in the strictest sense, so that no one can lay exclusive claim to an originary encounter with “Chaucer's English” (Ashton, 2007, p. 9). This realization should help free the non‐Anglophone teacher of medieval English literature from the specter of contamination or loss that still too often hounds many a scholar when dealing with translations.…”

“…In my episode, the slip or addition made by the presumptuous Korean translation, along with the discomfort it caused in its reader, brings our attention to suggestive possibilities left unexplored in Chaucer's original, and can even trigger a fresh reading of the tale. It is also useful to remember that “even within Chaucer's own poetry, Middle English is a slippery construct,” and that it is difficult to assign the mark of an “original” to any single version even within Chaucer's own language (Ashton, 2007, p. 9).…”