Turning Songs into Poems and Poems into Songs: Intersections of Literary Sinitic and Vernacular Korean in Chosŏn Literature

Abstract:This article investigates the dynamic intersections of Literary Sinitic and vernacular Korean and their impact on the innovations in poetry and song in fifteenth-through nineteenth-century Chosŏn Korea. More specifically, it traces the evolution of poetry or song discourse and explores the different strategies employed by Chosŏn poets and songwriters to render oral songs into text. It also investigates the differing views on the function of poetry and song, musical and textual preservation, and emotional and lyrical immediacy, which influenced the composition and translation of song-poems. The article probes the creative collaboration and competition between Literary Sinitic and vernacular Korean, and the fluid relations between translation and vernacularization. On the whole, it explores the ways in which the evolution of poetry-song discourse and the ensuing literary innovations contributed to Chosŏn’s complex linguistic ecology.