Yoo Yeong


Yoo Yeong was a South Korean literary scholar, translator, and poet.
He was a professor at the Department of English Language and Literature of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea from 1956 to 1983. He taught English Poetry at school, his specialty being in John Milton and Rabindranath Tagore. He was given the Dongbaeg Medal by the South Korean government for his contribution to education when he retired from his professorate in 1983. He translated many literary works such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained into Korean. He was the first Korean to translate the complete collection of Tagore’s poetry.
He is also known for his acquaintance with one of the most well-known poets in Korea, Yun Dong-ju. After the poet’s death, Yoo’s memorial poem for his friend was included in the first edition of Yun’s posthumously published collection of poems. Being a poet himself, Yoo published his own poems under the titles Day and Night , The Preface of Air and Earth , The Mind is a Wing and so on. A translation award is being given under his name since 2007.

Life

Yoo was born in 1917 in Yongin, Korea, Empire of Japan. Before he went to public school, he was taught at a traditional Korean village school at the age of six. He went to Yonhi College in 1938. Graduating from school in 1943, he worked at the newspaper Keijō Nippō until 1945. He was arrested and imprisoned for 6 months by the Japanese government under the security law set during the Japan’s Occupation of Korea. After the Japanese occupation of the country ended in 1945, he majored in English Literature at Seoul National University. He worked at Taesung High School as a teacher from 1948 to 1956. He was a professor at Yonsei University from 1956 to his retirement in 1983.

Works

Yoo’s main study on literature was on John Milton and Rabindranath Tagore. His study on Milton, A Study of the Miltonic Epic: Its Poetic Structures from Aesthetic Point of View, was introduced in John M. Steadman’s Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost as one of the “recent studies of Milton’s major poetry, its structure, and its relations to epic and tragic tradition.” His lifelong study on Tagore was published as The Literature of Tagore: The Aesthetics of its Myth and Mystery in 1983. His scholarly world also includes comparisons between literatures of the West and the East. In The Aesthetic Perception of the Western and Eastern literature, he traces the common themes that reoccur in both the Western and Eastern region’s literatures.

Yoo Yeong Translation Award

In 2007, Yoo Yeong’s son, Yoo Hyuksoo established a translation award under the name of his father in order to remember his contribution to the translation history in Korea. The award is given every year on November at Yonsei University. Yoo Yeong Translation Symposium has been held at the same day and place since 2016. The award is being co-sponsored by Yoo Yeong Research Foundation and the Department of English Language and Literature of Yonsei University. In 2017, the award was given to Uhm Il-nyeo who translated Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger.”

Relationship with Yun Dong-ju

Yoo was one of the closest friends of the well-known Korean poet Yun Dong-ju. He entered Yonhi College in the same year with the poet. They lived at the same lodging house and wrote poems together with their fellow school colleagues. In an interview with MBC news in 1995, Yoo remembered the poet Yun to have had a sincere and warm smiling attitude, his entire life being a poem. Yoo’s memorial poem for his friend was included in the first edition of the poet Yun’s posthumously published collection of poems.

Published works

Translations

  • Homer, 일리어드; 오딧세이
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, 이중인간
  • Tagore, 타골選集
  • John Milton, 失樂園; 復樂園
  • Tagore, 타골詩選
  • D. H. Lawrence, 아들과 戀人; 채털리 夫人의 사랑
  • Tagore, 고라
  • Virgil, 아에네이스
  • Younghill Kang, 동양선비 서양에 가다

    Poetry

  • 日月
  • 天地序
  • 마음은 날개
  • 춤추는 바벨탑
  • 너와 나의 랑데뷰