Sunghyun JANG

10.18399/acta.2023.26.2.004

intertextuality Kim Yŏngnang John Keats “Tugyŏn ” “Ode to a Nightingale”

This study adopts a comparative literary approach to two well-known poems composed in Korean and English, respectively: “Tugyŏn” (The cuckoo) by Kim Yŏngnang (金永郞) and “Ode to a Nightingale” by the English Romantic poet John Keats. In both poems the solitary speaker is responding to the bird’s song, but an intertextual reading of the two works reveals far more than this obvious similarity in the ways that deepen our understanding of their texts. Densely intertextual in itself, the text of each poem is a mixture of earlier texts which include the works of literature, historical sources, and literary or cultural conventions. Moreover, the relationship of “The Cuckoo” to the Nightingale ode proves explicitly intertextual. The third stanza of “The Cuckoo,” in particular, seems to have been produced in reaction to the seventh stanza of “Nightingale.” The imagistic structure of the former parallels that of the latter in that three successive scenes in each stanza feature different auditors (some of them being historical and literary figures) hearing the music of the bird. As illustrated by the depictions of Ruth and Ch’unhyang, a creative side do both of Keats’s and Yŏngnang’s dependence on other texts in the composition process have. In addition, the relationship between aspirations to death and the experience of beauty turns out to be paradoxical in both poems, which is an effect of intertextuality. While engaging creatively and intertextually in Keats’s ode, Yŏngnang evolved a ‘pure’ lyric style that laid the foundation for modern Korean poetry.