이야기 속의 미당 시학 -『서정주 세계민화집』에 나타난 연연과 초연의 시인 자격- = Midang’s Poetry in Stories -The Poet’s Qualifications of fixation and detachment as Appeared in the 󰡔Seo Jeong-ju World Folktales󰡕-

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In “Poetry and Life,” Midang describes what kind of person a poet is. Compared to a saint who is qualified as a teacher of humanity, a poet is qualified as a lover of humanity. A poet is a person who accompanies people in low places and becomes a friend to those who are suffering. Baudelaire and Li Bai represent two types of poets. Baudelaire is a poet who cries with the heart of a crying person, and Li Bai is a poet who calms down a crying person and allows them to look up at nature with a light heart.
These qualities of a poet’s heart, which can be called fixation and detachment respectively, are widely expressed in the stories in “Seo Jeong-ju’s World Folktales.” Among the many stories from the world, these stories are ones that Midang particularly paid attention to and sympathized with. Therefore, although they are not Midang’s creations, they reflect Midang’s spiritual world. This is even more so because Midang himself translated them beyond translation. Midang seems to have rediscovered his own poetic theory in the old stories of the world and highlighted it through translation beyond translation.
In this article, I will examine how the poet’s qualifications are expressed in five stories: “The Bird that Lived in a Big Pine Tree for Ten Thousand Years,” “Prandro’s Oblivion Stone,” “What Happened Because of the Bow,” “The Sorrow of the Frog,” and “The Curse of the White Weasel.” This shows an interesting point where Midang’s poetic spirit and the literary spirit in world stories meet in impressive harmony.