Chunhyang concluded

• a Love Story?
• a Parable about Loyalty? or Virtue?
• a satire on the corruption of officials?

  consider that the Poem is really the pivot of the story: suddenly the Jig is Up for Governor Byun

  This beautiful wine in golden vases
  Is the blood of a thousand people.
  This magnificent meat on these jade tables
  Is the flesh and marrow of ten thousand lives.
  When the drops roll down from the candles,
  Burning in this banquet hall,
  The tears of the hungry people
  Pour from their sunken eyes.
  Even louder than the noisy song of these courtesans
  Resound the complaints of the oppressed peasants.

  (from http://my.netian.com/~wun113/folk_tale/folk7.htm)

• collision of Personal and Social responsibility?

  isn't Governor Byun correct when he says "Class has a definite order. A daughter of a courtesan becomes one naturally. She didn't disobey just me, but she disgraced the law, and committed treason"?
  ...how is Myungrong's response ("It wasn't injustice, it was her will to be a human being") an answer? Is "injustice" perhaps a mistranslation?

• a case in Status of Women?
• other readings?

Some other poetry matters:

Hwang Chini, a reknowned kisaeng poet

Poetry condenses, and casts IMAGES, metaphors, "ambiguous undulations" (Wallace Stevens --see, for example, The Laowai Monologues for an interesting intersection) ...and forces reconsideration of tacit assumptions and accepted categories.

It occurs to me that we're looking at another Human Universal here --just as Music is something found in every culture, so is Allusion, the play with words, dissembling, prosody... People DON'T just 'say what they mean' --they choose their words, they clothe their messages according to complex emotional calculi. Flattery, bureaucratese, levels of formality... all fascinating, and all notoriously hard to translate from one frame (e.g., one language) to another.

The question of translation is right at the heart of the problems Anthropology seeks to address. Languages are category systems, ontological arenas...

A book you should know about: Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot: in praise of the music of language (P306 .H63 1997 --but checked out at the moment to some faculty member [NOT myself --I have my very own copy...]) ...see the Wikipedia article and amazon.com record for more.