It cannot be too much emphasized that in reading and appreciating poems, a correct understanding and interpretation of them is necessary; in criticizing and teaching 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 was found that both American and Korean scholars have made some errors in interpreting 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 the poem. They saw “all the rant” as made by the poetic speaker. Cross-checking the sentence structure and contextual meaning of the part makes it reasonable to say that the rant was a line uttered by Nature, the tragic hero of the tragedy which is the winter season. In the same way two Korean scholars made the same mistranslation of the word “hole” in the first stanza. They translated the word as an empty space within the bottom of the bed of Lake Coole. When one applies the sense to the line where the word belongs, the meaning of the part does not fit in well with the meaning 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 harmonizes well with that of the whole stanza. In view of the errors committed in common by both Anglo-American and Korean 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 not attain. This ideal can never be realized by a single person; but by the collaborative work of many researchers engaged in elucidation of the same literary work in their own way. This is, specifically, true of the Korean scholars who usually rely upon what their Anglo-American counterparts say about the literary works of the Anglo-American writers and poets. When this kind of collaborative work has been accumulated, and is easily accessible to our junior scholars, they will benefit greatly by avoiding the confusion suffered often by their senior scholars.

• 우철환(고려대) | Woo,CheolHwan