정지용 동시의 전통 계승 양상 -「띄」, 「딸레(人形)와 아주머니」의 개작 과정을 중심으로-

Abstract

This article is based on children’s poems by Jung Jiyoung first published in the magazine Hakjo(學潮), then revised in another journal called 어린이/Children. Special emphasis will be placed on Jung’s two pieces entitled doll and 三月삼질날/the (lunar) March 3 Festival, the revised editions of doll undergoing the process ofrecomposition and Doll and WOMAN. The aim of this study is to define the traits of Jung’s poetry for children found in the recomposition process. There are opposing views of poetry by Jiyoung, one looking at him as a sensual modernist and the other seeing him as spiritual traditionalist. These conflicting, adversarial viewpoints do not reflect the overall picture of his poesy. Jiyoung did not abandon the early period of his work marked by a sensuous tendency in order to claim his support for traditionalism in his later period; as his theories of poetry suggest, his poems indicate a dual tendency of accommodating Western modernism on one hand while adhering to Eastern tradition on the other hand. His works bearing a semblance to children’s and folk songs pop up more during the early rather than middle period of his activity as a poet and aspects of Oriental esthetics surface to the foreground of his poems in the later period of his work. That is all. An Anthology of Jung Jiyoung’s Poetrycarries a total of 23children’s poems. That is not a small number at all. There are only a few research articles on them, however. Note that after the anthology was published, Jung produced no more children’s poems. As a founding proponent of the Josun Research Association of Children’s Poetry, however, he nevertheless showed a profound interest in children’ literature. Prior to the recent discovery of the journal Children, Vol. 11, No. 6, researchers of Jiyoung’s poems for children had assumed that the Jung Jiypoung Anthology simply a compilation of Doll and WOMAN in its revised form. With discovery the journal just mentioned, we are now able to conduct a far more careful examination of the process of his recomposition. As a result of this study, I can tell that Jiyoung did want to adhere to the natural landscape and ethos of our land along with the form of heroic couplets and the 4-step type of composition (introduction, development, turn, and conclusion) characteristic of Chinese poetry. Jiyoung created works by carrying on the rhymes and subject matter of Korean poetry as distinct from the 7·5 meter Japanese style of children’s poems that had been in circulation during his days. We can thus appreciate how painstaking a job it must have been for Jiyoung (who wrote children’s poems based on our unique metrical rules in terms of our own nature and ethos) to make the format of heroic couplet and the prototype of modern Korean children’s poetry take root. In view of the creative work he produced by employing the form of heroic couplet with references to the unique landscapes and ethos plus our particular metric rules and the many contributions he made as a founding member of Josun Research Association of Children’s Poetry, we can surely say Jung Jiyoung was the true pioneer of Korean poetry for children.