셰이머스 히니와 故허수경의 고고학적 상상력 비교

Abstract

Seamus Heaney and Sukyung Huh share a common poetic ground in that both poets practiced archaeological imagination, musing on the bog bodies and old bones, ancient mummies, and skeletons. From Death of a Naturalist to The Spirit Level, Heaney went out to fields and tried to come to terms with the moments of violence and terror in the ancient history of Northern Europe. From What Could Be a Better Compost Than Sorrow? to At the Station None Remembers Huh, too, witnessed a wide range of evidences of destruction and cruelty, found in the excavation fields in the Mesopotamia region. While Heaney could return to his poetic guide Dante and the English poetic tradition in translating the memories of old bones into the tragic elegies of the Northen Europeans, Huh had few guides to light up her struggles, in waiting for the answers from the skeletons of ancient Sumerians, to comprehend the tragic moments of their dying. Still, both poets transmit the genuine energy of the magical moment in which the pre-linguistic times of the ancient humankind get fixed by their poetic imagination and re-enter the record of humankind through a poet’s will to communicate. This paper, noting the archaeological imagination of both poets, aims to illuminate the power of poetry to help the reader meditate on the common language of tragedy.