초록/요약

A French poet Georges Ducrocq visited Korea in 1901 and published a travelogue titled Pauvre et douse Corée(Poor and Douce Korea) several years later. This study examined his perception of Korean poetry found in this book. Ducrocq intended to describe only the things he observed and the intention to depict the lives of Koreans in detail by activating his imagination. The former can be called the orientation as an ‘observer’ because he did not consider Korea as an object of analysis or edification but tried to write down the daily lives of Koreans from a distance. The latter orientation corresponds to ‘intuition’. Ducrocq was interested in the vivid life of Koreans that he could not see and imagined it with his intuition. So, it can be summarized that Ducrocq described his experiences in Korea from the standpoint of an ‘intuitive observer’ or by demonstrating his ‘intuition as an observer’. This point should be considered in depth when examining his perception of Korean poetry. The person who attempted the most academic approach to Korean poetry up to that time was Maurice Courant. However, although they are both French, there is a clear difference in the way and purpose of discussing Korean poetry between Courant and Ducrocq. While Courant tried to describe the characteristics of Korean poetry as objectively as possible, Ducrocq emphasized the contents of Korean poetry, such as Korean emotions and daily life, rather than its literary form, and he was careful to intuitively capture the situations behind the text. Such a difference between Courant and Ducrocq is ​​similar to that of James Gale and Homer Hulbert, the Anglo-American missionaries who discussed Korean poetry. Ducrocq sympathized with Hulbert’s translation, which contained detailed poetic situations not found in the original text. However, while following Hulbert’s paraphrase method, Ducrocq chose the middle way to revive the work's original context as much as possible. He used Gale’s translation of sijo poems, which reflects the meaning and form of the original work relatively well, but reorganized three or four sijo poems with similar themes into one context. In this way, while utilizing the original work's meaning, Western readers were able to accept the feeling of Korean poetry more easily. Such a method can be called ‘weaving’. In the process of translating, he tried to smooth the poem's flow by omitting some phrases and lines or inserting expressions that were not in the original work and to reveal the three stages of development of sijo poetry in his translation. In addition, Ducrocq described that the condensed and lively expressions found in Korean proverbs form the basis of Korean literature, which means that the expression patterns of Korean proverbs and poetry are very similar. Meanwhile, attention is also paid to his general opinion that universal emotions that transcend time appear more frequently in Korean poetry than the problems of painful reality. His comments are linked to a positive evaluation that Korean poetry has the best value in the lives of struggling Koreans. It is said that Koreans provided an opportunity to step aside from hardship by evoking emotions that can be universally felt in any era or society through literature, especially poetry. Ducrocq translated several works of Korean poetry and presented them to French readers because he decided that to understand the life of Koreans, one had to know their poetry. In this regard, Ducrocq can be evaluated as having carried out a very advanced and full-scale search compared to any other Westerners of this period who discussed Korean literature.