『오뇌의 무도』 성립 사정에 대하여 : 초판(1921)을 중심으로

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the circumstances around the publication of Kim Eok's The Dance of Agony (1921), which was the starting point of modern Korea’s acceptance of French symbolism and the origin of modern poetry in Korea. Studying at Keio University (April, 1914~1916?), Kim Eok was a literary youth that randomly read works of Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Turgenev as well as Verlaine and Baudelaire without any certain standards and researches. In this mixed residence of intelligence, he decided to find examples of new Joseon-style poems in French symbolist poetry between December 1918 and July 1920. Since then, he began to write the draft of The Dance of Agony in full scale. In the process, he used anthologies of translated poems by Horiguchi Daigaku and Ikuda Shungetsu as his Source texts. He adopted the method of second-hand translation by deconstructing phrases in poems translated in Japanese and rewriting them. These anthologies of poems translated in Japanese appeared in the so-called “era of Japan’s fascination with France” since the 1910s amid the global vogue of anthologies of modern French poems by Gérard Walch, Adolphe van Bever, and Paul Léautaud in the early 20th century. Kim’s The Dance of Agony is an outcome of Korea's new poetry interlocking with the contemporary literary circles of Japan and Europe. It was both the origin of modern Korea's fever with French symbolism and the translation of Verlaine and Baudelaire, which reminded people of Japan’s “infatuation with French” era, and the opportunity and beginning of patterns to find examples of Joseon’s new poetry and Joseon-style modern poetry writing in the translation of modern Western poetry in the literary history of Korea. The Korean-style free verses whose genetic origin was The Dance of Agony were products of translation (second-hand translation) and effects of modern French and Western poems spreading to East Asia beyond Europe. In addition, The Dance of Agony was an event in the literary history of East Asia and further the world as well as the literary history of Korea.