예이츠와 일본의 노(能) = Yeats and the Japanese Noh

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

William Butler Yeats(1865-1939) held a life-long interest in Japanese culture, and employed the images, knowledge and inspirations he gained from Japan in many of his literary works. On the Whole, it was the Japanese literary form that that the most significance in his development as a writer. The period of his writing that shows the greatest Japanese influence, consciously absorbing Japanese material and techniques in his writing, spans roughly the year 1914 to 1921. However, Japanese motifs and images recurrently appear in his later works.
It was through the translations of Ezra Pound that Yeats became acquainted with noh, the medieval Japanese drama. Yeats's encounter with noh marked a turning point in his career as a dramatist. The noh led him to create "a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic…an aristocratic form" in which the supernatural dominates the stage and where the action develops toward a moment of enlightenment or revelation. In "Note to At the Hawk's Well," Yeats writes:
I have found my first model--and in literature of we would not be parvenus, we must have a model--in the 'Noh' stage of aristocratic Japan.
From this statement we can perceive how significant the noh form was to Yeats in his development as a playwright. In this essay, I have discussed Yeats's relationship with noh through a detailed analysis of Dreaming of the Bones(1919) and Purgatory(1939). Both plays have much in common: they are both ghost plays and pursue the theme of purgation. The Dreaming of the Bones is Yeats's first and most consciously faithful rendition of the noh form called "mugen noh("vision play" or "ghost play"). However, it is in Purgatory that Yeats succeeded in achieving a dramatic effect closet to that of noh.
When Yeats was first introduced to noh, he immediately saw in it affinities with Irish legends and beliefs. In his "Introduction" to Certain Noble Plays of Japan, he went so far as to declare that "the men who created this convention were more like ourselves than were the Greeks and Romans, more like us even than are Shakespeare and Corneille." The noh was not something completely new or alien to Yeats. Indeed it was an ideal discovery which provided him a new form to express his perennial themes of the tension between the physical and spiritual worlds and the inability of the human spirit to release itself from its ties with the physical world.