韓日 근대시의 청춘과 하늘 - 윤동주와 나카하라 츄야(中原中也) 비교

Abstract

The period when Dongju Yoon went to study in Japan was the gloomiest time of the history in Asia in the 20th century. The imperialist age was certainly threatening to the local residents, in a different context than to a foreigner like Dongju Yoon. Dongju Yoon and Nakahara Chuya, as a foreigner vs. a citizen, had extremely different political stances and personalities. However, they both were lonely 'youths' and 'individuals,' with one in a rokuchou-tatami and the other outside of it, dreaming of their respective sky and writing poems. They are essentially similar in that both of them were 'lonely individuals' and 'poets of youth' who dedicated their 20's to writing verses, outside of the mainstream literary world. They were also ashamed of being tarnished, the ethical mysophobia of which is a characteristic of youth. Behind this mysophobia is the Christian view of the world, in which they are also alike. On the basis of these similarities there are sensitivity to the nature and an ideal landmark of the sky. The sky was an altitude of life and an index of ethics that the two youths were dreaming of. Looking up at the sky is related to an act of responding to the surroundings and looking inside the self; therefore, this process, to both Yoon and Chuya, helped to develop a unique world of poetry whose features include shame and reflective penitence. The youths were examining the self on the basis of the sky, and they were earnestly seeking a way to overcome the split reality. The two poets died young, one of illness and the other in prison; they fulfilled the legend of youth with the premature death. Their poems contained the youth particular to the end of their lives, i.e. pure and high ideals, which are necessarily accompanied by melancholy and despair. The youth in the colony affirmed the existential self by drawing the sky into the inner side, under the sky in the dismal period, whereas the Japanese youth, who lived as a local, converged himself into the timeless and fantastic sky. The two youths shared the sky in the furious age, but they stood on different spots; therefore, they looked for disparate, poetic exits, having different ways for feelings and conflicts. To consider Dongju Yoon and Nakahara Chuya in comparison puts some aspects, which hardly emerge from the exiting unilateral view, into a comparative outlook. It thereby should open up new horizons of research in which the modern Korean and Japanese poetries can communicate.