백석 시집 『사슴』의 시편을 읽는 또 하나의 방법

Abstract

Previous studies on Baek Seok have passed through the following three stages, taken as a whole. The first stage was initiated by Lee Soong-won, Ko Hyung-jin, and Lee Dong-soon. Since the early 1980s, those professors have recognized the importance of Baek Seok and tried to include his works into the Korean literary history. Then, the second stage started with the various doctoral theses on Baek Seok which have poured into several Graduate Schools of Literature since the ban on his poetry was lifted in 1988. As the final third stage, we can point out the compilation work of various forms of the complete series, the originals, and commentary books of Baek Seok’s poetry. Out of those three stages, the third one is the most important in the study of Baek Seok’s works. In this process, however, the early researchers like Lee Dong-soon and Song Joon primarily have made mistakes such as interpreting the meanings of Baek Seok’s poetic words as they pleased, without giving accurate bases for those interpretations. And various publishers, editors, and researchers exacerbated those mistakes. But in the end, professors like Ko Hyung-jin and Lee Soong-won tried to rectify those mistakes by presenting consistent interpretations of the poetic words. By the way, despite the various research on and interest in Baek Seok’s literature, the interpretations on his poetic words are still inconsistent for almost every literary professors and critics. Thus the study site of Baek Seok’s literature has become an unrealistic communication site where the same vocabularies used in the same poems are construed quite differently. Therefore, researchers or editors should not publish books which introduce only one meaning of a vocabulary or a sentence without providing a clear basis for that interpretation. That is, commentary books on poetry should introduce plural meanings of a poetic word, and should present only one of them which the critics think the most appropriate, with the reason for choosing that meaning as the most suitable one. That’s because dismissing the idea that there should exist only one explanation for a poem is the shortcut to solve the problem through.