정치적 난민과 월경(越境)의 문학 : 김시종의 경우

Abstract

Kim Si-jong (1929~ ) was a political refugee who participated in the Jeju April 3 uprising as a member of the organization when he was a young man and smuggled himself to Japan at the risk of his life to avoid the arrest of the punitive military police. After living mainly in Osaka since 1949, he has been engaged in literary activities for 70 years, publishing a number of poems from 『Horizon Line(地平線)』(1955) to 『a Map on One’s Back(背中の地図)』(2018). He wrote poems only in Japanese, but he was outside the Japanese literary circle, not inside the Korean literary circle or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He was a man of strict vigilance. His poems successfully consist of the aspect of political refugees who pursued the revolution, the existential problems as Koreans in Japan, and the sublimation of imagination beyond boundaries. In particular, he is a poet who has proved with his whole body that if we emphasize the border (ideology), peace of mankind is impossible, and that we can create a whole world of peace only when the imagination beyond the border is exercised properly. Kim Si-jong's long journey from political refugees to true a marginal man through the process of expanding his difficult perception of the April 3 uprising can be said to be both heartbreaking and tearful. The imagination of crossing boundaries bloomed amid such adversity is as shining as that. And I think that's why Kim Si-jong's literature can proudly establish itself as a model for world literature.