키츠의 「챕먼의 호머」 읽기: 발터 벤야민의 번역이론을 통해

Abstract

This essay reads Keats’s 1816 sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” as a text that articulates the poet’s view of translation—a view that, the essay argues, coincides closely with that of Walter Benjamin as expounded in his 1921 essay “The Task of the Translator.” The “mistiness” of Chapman’s English translation, as Keats puts it, forcefully engages Keats’s imagination, inspiring him to boldly proclaim that he has grasped the very essence of Homeric epics in Chapman’s work. Benjamin’s ideas about the relation between the original text and the translator’s own language, his conception of “pure language” in particular, lend revealing insights into the way that Keats creatively incorporates Homer into his poetic experiences through Chapman’s mediation as his invention of the two remarkable similes in the sonnet’s sestet illustrates. In other words, Benjamin’s account of the performance of translation helps us better understand how Keats grows to poetic maturity by accessing the Greek canon in the mistiness of translation.