정치체를 번역하다: 동아시아 번역 속 이솝의 <배의 우화>

초록

This article examines how Aesop’s “Belly and the Members” generates political imagination as it moves across languages and East Asian contexts. Translation is conceptualized not as neutral transfer but as a political intervention that repositions concepts and rewires equivalences between “body” and “community.” Comparative readings of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean receptions reveal distinct modes of appropriation: missionary texts align the Pauline metaphor of the “body of Christ” with traditional organology; Meiji and colonial textbooks recast the fable within physiological and moral-pedagogical frameworks, disciplining cooperation as a civic virtue. Such “depoliticization,” however, operates as a repoliticization by inviting visions of order, health, and mutual aid. These trajectories show that the body-politic metaphor is not a universal cognitive model but a historically contingent schema shaped by knowledge regimes (medicine, theology, law) and mediating institutions (missions, translation, textbook). The fable’s formal openness-brevity, allegory, personification-enables divergent deployments: naturalizing hierarchy, inculcating cooperation, or provoking ironic resistance. Ultimately, “the body” functions simultaneously as natural and political, a device for imagining the many as one. By situating translation at this junction, the article argues that the fable has served as a mobile touchstone for negotiating what counts as a “healthy community” across Western and East Asian discursive fields.

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