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영어

This paper aims to survey the extant Korean translations of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Stanza 1, and to suggest a new version of translation for the stanza. Unlike English, Korean completes every sentence with an honorific suffix added to the end of the verb conjugation. In its present Korean translations, the stanza reads as divided into two parts uttered by two different speakers respectively. It is that the honorific suffixes are the demarcators of speakers in Korean, and that the translators change their use of honorifics from non-respectful ‘-는다,’ ‘-거니,’ ‘- 니라’ or ‘-지’ to respectful ‘-요’ or ‘-습니다’ in lines 11-12 or in lines 7-8, depending on the translator. They all rely on the group of Eliot scholars who have understood the stanza as spoken by two speakers, the poet/narrator and Marie. However, I basically side with another group of scholars who set up Marie to be the single speaker throughout the stanza. Supporting their views as more appropriate to the poetic context, I reinforce their plausibility by my own interpretation and demonstrate that Marie is the overall speaker relating her present and past life story. Thus this paper presents a new Korean translation of mine for The Waste Land, Stanza 1, where all the sentences uniformly end with the honorific suffix ‘-요,’ which was never attempted before.