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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.28 pp.67-81
DOI :

“Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”: Errors in Interpretation

Woo Cheol Hwan

Abstract

It cannot be too much emphasized that in reading and appreciating poems, acorrect understanding and interpretation of them is necessary; in criticizing andteaching them, a correct understanding based on the correct interpretation is a must.In the course of translating “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” into Korean, it wasfound that both American and Korean scholars have made some errors ininterpreting the poem. Two American scholars, Thomas R. Whitaker and Daniel A.Harris, made the same misinterpretation of the 4th line in the second stanza of thepoem. They saw “all the rant” as made by the poetic speaker. Cross-checking thesentence structure and contextual meaning of the part makes it reasonable to saythat the rant was a line uttered by Nature, the tragic hero of the tragedy which isthe winter season.
In the same way two Korean scholars made the same mistranslation of theword “hole” in the first stanza. They translated the word as an empty space withinthe bottom of the bed of Lake Coole. When one applies the sense to the linewhere the word belongs, the meaning of the part does not fit in well with themeaning of the whole poem. After all, it is also reasonable to say that the word“hole” means “a deep place in a body of water” in that the meaning harmonizeswell with that of the whole stanza.
In view of the errors committed in common by both Anglo-American andKorean scholars, no one can be expected to be perfect in interpreting literary works.Perfect interpretation is an ideal which every literary critic aims at but does notattain. This ideal can never be realized by a single person; but by the collaborativework of many researchers engaged in elucidation of the same literary work in theirown way. This is, specifically, true of the Korean scholars who usually rely uponwhat their Anglo-American counterparts say about the literary works of theAnglo-American writers and poets. When this kind of collaborative work has beenaccumulated, and is easily accessible to our junior scholars, they will benefit greatlyby avoiding the confusion suffered often by their senior scholars.

「1931년, 쿨 파크와 밸릴리」 : 해석의 오류*

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