Month: April 2010

금도끼와 은도끼

옛날 어느 마을에 가난한 나무꾼이 살고 있었습니다.  그는 어머니를 모시고 살았는데, 부지런해서 늘 아침 일찍 산으로 가서 나무를 했습니다.
어느 날 산 속에서 연못 옆에 있는 큰 나무를 발견하고 도끼로 세게 찍기 시작했습니다.  그런데 손에 힘이 없어져서 도끼를 연못에 빠뜨렸습니다.  하나밖에 없는 도끼를 빠뜨린 나무꾼은 연못을 보면서 한숨을 쉬었습니다.  그 때 갑자기 연못의 물이 움직이면서 하얀 연기와 함께 산신령님이 나타나셨습니다.  산신령님은 금으로 만든 도끼를 내밀면서 말했습니다.
“이 금도끼가 당신이 빠뜨린 것입니까?”
“아닙니다.”
“그럼 이 은도끼가 당신의 도끼입니까?”
“그것도 제 것이 아닙니다.”
“그럼 이것입니까?”라고 하면서 그가 빠뜨린 쇠도끼를 내밀었습니다.
“네, 바로 그것이 제 도끼입니다.”
산신령님은 “당신은 정직하기 때문에 이 도끼들을 모두 당신에게 줄 테니까 가져가십시오.”라고 말하고 도끼 세 개를 준 후에 다시 연못 속으로 사라졌습니다.
그래서 그 나무꾼은 부자가 되었고 그 후에 결혼을 해서 행복하게 살았습니다.
No… I didn’t write this story.  It’s an old Korean fairy tale.  I like the story.
The version here is copied from my Korean Language textbook, at the end of the book.  It’s provided as a kind of culmination of all the material covered.  Note especially all the various constructions using the many possible meanings of “~(으)로.”
But the translation of the story, provided in the appendix, is truly terrible – it manages to be bad English, while at the same time failing to be a close, phrase-for-phrase translation of the Korean, which is what would be useful in a language textbook.  So you can’t really use the translation to figure out confusing grammar points, on the one hand, but it’s not a very clear version of the story, on the other.
So, being the strange person that I am, I decided to attempt my own translation, which follows.  I’m trying to stay very close to the Korean, trying to ensure that each Korean phrase and grammatical element has a match to its closest English equivalent, that I can figure out – but at the same time I’m trying to make sure it’s at least passable English, meaning no glaring grammatical or idiomatic errors.
If there are mistakes in the Korean above, blame my poor Korean typing skills, not my Korean textbook – it’s probably just a typo, since I copied the text of the story from my textbook manually.

The gold axe and the silver axe

In olden days a poor woodcutter was living in some village.  That man lived with his mother, and since he was industrious, every morning he went to the mountain and cut wood.
One day, being at the mountain near a pond, he found a big tree and be began to cut it with his axe.  But then his hand became weak and he dropped the axe in the pond.  The woodcutter, having but the one axe, looked in the pond and sighed.  At that moment suddenly the pond’s waters stirred and, along with some white smoke, a mountain spirit appeared.  The mountain spirit held out a gold axe, and spoke.
“Did you drop this gold axe?”
“No, sir.”
“Then is this silver axe your axe?”
“That isn’t mine either.”
“Then is this yours?” he said, and held out the dropped iron axe.
“Yes, that’s definitely my axe.”
The mountain spirit said, “Because you are honest I will give you all these axes, so take them,” and with that he gave the three axes and disappeared again into the pond.
And so the woodcutter became rich, and after that he got married and lived happily.