『訓民正音』 序文과 King Alfred의 Cura Pastoralis 序文 : 文孝根 선생님께 = King Sejong's Preface to Hun-min-joˇng-um and King Alfred's Preface to Cura Pastoralis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

King Sejong´s preface to Hun-min-joˇng-um and King Alfred´s preface to his translation of Pope Gregory´s Cura Pastoralis share much spiritual kinship, in spite of the fact that they are literary products of two totally unrelated cultural climates and traditions. The latter, written in the form of an epistle, is much longer than the former. But the disparity in length is only a matter of superficiality, for the spirits revealed in the two pieces of writing are identical.
King Sejong´s wish to free the whole nation from the painful frustration and humiliation of the incapacitation illiteracy, thereby building up national pride and a strong sense of cultural identity, finds an echo in King Alfred´s wish to achieve cultural renaissance by making it possible for his people to have access to the classics. The only difference is that the Korean monarch wanted to attain unity of the spoken language and the letter, while the British king wanted to enable his people to read the classics by rendering them into the vernacular. But the guiding spirits are the same: to enhance the intellectual life of a people is to strengthen the nation.
A major portion of the essay is an interpretive discussion of the text of King Alfred´s preface, with occasional references to King Sejong´s statement. The different fates of the manuscripts of the two documents, however, are a painful remainder of how neglectful we the Korean nation have been in the preservation of our cultural legacies.