In December, 2007 the present writer wrote a paper on the errors in interpretation in which I raised an objection to the two Korean professors' translation of ‘hole’ which appear in the first stanza of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” into Korean 구멍. Instead, the present writer insisted that ‘hole’ means ‘a deep place in a body of water’, one of the definitions of the word as described in Webster's Third New International Dictionary in that the meaning harmonizes well with the whole poem. But in May, 2009, Mr. Kim, Sangmoo, Professor Emeritus of Young Nam University read his paper to the effect that the present writer was wrong. His paper subjected the present writer to a thorough examination into the matter. In the course of close examination, the present writer came upon a book entitled A Yeats Dictionary. The present writer consulted the book for some hint leading to the solution of the present issue. At last the present writer found what he wanted in its entry, Coole Park. It read, "The lake further fascinated Yeats because its only drain was a narrow subterranean passage which caused the lake to double and treble its size in winter." All quess-works are needed no more. The present writer had to own that he made a mistake by his hasty conclusion. The ‘hole’ was the only drain in Coole lake, so that its translation into ‘구멍’ in Korean does not mar the meaning of the poem. In addition, this research proved fruitful in some other way. In the process of solving the above-mentioned point in question, the present writer faced a problematical and arbitrary way of Prof. Kim's presenting his argument in his paper. This gave the present writer a motivation to suggest, although in a crude way, a desirable mode of presenting arguments in paper.
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.