162
ВестникЦентракорейскогоязыкаикультуры. Выпуск11
evenstrongerdue to the fact the female feels lonely inher sufferingandsees
it impossible to share her feelingswithother people.
This situation is explained through the secondopposition:
“a spaceof
the narrator— the outer space”
. Both of these oppositions important in
a viewof the poem’s topic are set in the veryfirst line of the poem, though
in an indirect way. Here they are expressed through the following lexical
oppositions: the world of people
㧎ṚG
— loneliness
☛
, ten thousand of
matters
Ⱒ㌂G
— empty room
☛㓟Ὃ
.
㧎Ṛ┞⼚GⰢ㌂㯗㠦G
☛㓟Ὃ㧊G▪㤇G㎵┺G
Among the 10 000ofmatters related to separation in the humanworld
The saddest is to sleep alone in an empt
y room.
The space of the female narrator is limited by the space of the room
whereshespends the lonely timewithoutherbelovedandwhich issecluded
and empty.An empty room is another leitmotif of the text (
Ὃ
— line 1,
line 39 and
ゞ
— line 40).
⋮Ⳇ✺ⳆGゞ㦒⪲
㡺⧓Ṗ⧓G䢒㧦G㎪㎪
I enter the empty room and go out again
I go back-and-forth and standalone
This parallel is characteristic for traditional love poetry in
vernacular
8
where awomanmostly associates herself with the space of
a room. A room is pictured as a place inwhich a woman spends lonely
timemostly during the night-time
9
.AfixedChinese expression
☛㑯Ὃ
G纓菑簻脗
(the empty room I am sleeping lonely in) which is used
in the first line of the poem is one of the most common images of love
poetry. The opposition
the space of the room— outer space
is also
much common.
The outer space relates to the narrator’s beloved as this is the space he
left toand the spacehemight returnback from.Thiskindofoppositionmay
8
This characterizes both
sijo
and
gasa
texs.
9
For instance, a typical situation is depicted in the following lines of a
sijo
by an
unknown author:
Tonight I spent alone in an empty room,
Sleeping like a shrimp,
And the last night alsoalone inan empty room
I slept like a shrimp.
