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영어

Ham Seduk won a literary contest in 1940 with his play, The Sea Swallow, and then rewrote it after working for several years in the theater industry. The motive behind his rewriting has not been clearly explicated. Ham’s Sanhuguri is often said to have been influenced by J. M. Synge’s The Riders to the Sea. In the similar vein, he wrote The Sea Swallow, using Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea as a source. There are some irrefutable similarities between the two plays: characters, their jobs and relations, props, and so on. They do not exactly match, though. Ham used his source skillfully to make his a totally independent play. It is not clear which of Ibsen’s texts he used. He did not have the ability to read Ibsen’s original. He might have read the second text translated into Japanese and/or Korean. Ibsen was first introduced to Asian readers in English and German translation. Korean translators got help from Japanese versions, but tried to utilize the English versions, two of which can be identified. Compared with Ibsen’s The Lady of the Sea, the meaning of Ham’s rewriting can be more specifically traced down. Furthermore, Ibsen's influence on Ham can be reviewed in order to analyze how intertextuality works between the plays of the two playwrights.