The Cloud Dream of the Nine

The Cloud Dream of the Nine

Kim Man-Choong

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· Introduction

I.—THE BOOK

II.—THE TRANSLATOR

III.—THE AUTHOR

IV.—THE TALE

V.—WOMAN'S VOICE IN POLYGAMY

VI.—HEAVEN ON EARTH

VII.—THE PRESENT TRANSLATION

ELSPET KEITH ROBERTSON SCOTT

· The Novel

· Chapter I

· The Transmigration of Song-jin

· Chapter II

· A Glimpse of Chin See

· Chapter III

· The Meeting with Kay See

· Chapter IV

· In the Guise of a Priestess

· Chapter V

· Among the Fairies

· Chapter VI

· It is Cloudlet

· Chapter VII

· The Imperial Son-in-Law

· Chapter VIII

· A Hopeless Dilemma

· Chapter IX

· Among Mermaids and Mermen

· Chapter X

· Humble Submission

· Chapter XI

· The Capture of Cheung See

· Chapter XII

· Yang's Supreme Regret

· Chapter XIII

· The Awakening

· Chapter XIV

· In the Fairy Lists

· Chapter XV

· The Wine Punishment

· Chapter XVI

· The Answer: Back to the Buddha

· Appendix

annotated and illustrated English translation of 1922

Etext by the Eldritch Press

The Cloud Dream of the Nine [Kuunmong]

A Korean Noveclass="underline" A story of the times of the Tangs of China about 840 A.D.

By Kim Man-Choong

[Kim Man-jung]

[President of the Confucian College]

[Written in or after 1689]

Translated [from Korean (Hangul) to English]

by [Rev.] James S[carth] Gale

[Canadian, 1863-1937] thirty years resident in Korea (by 1922)

With an Introduction by Elspet Keith Robertson Scott

and Sixteen Illustrations

[title page recto image]

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[title page verso image]

Introduction

I.—THE BOOK

THE reader must lay aside all Western notions of morality if he would thoroughly enjoy this book. The scene of the amazing “Cloud Dream of the Nine,” the most moving romance of polygamy ever written, is laid about 849 A.D. in the period of the great Chinese dynasty of the Tangs. By its simple directness this hitherto unknown Korean classic makes an ineffaceable impression.

But the story of the devotion of Master Yang to eight women and of their devotion to him and to each other is more than a naive tale of the relations of men and women under a social code so far removed from our own as to be almost incredible. It is a record of emotions, aspirations and ideas which enables us to look into the innermost chambers of the Chinese soul. “The Cloud Dream of the Nine” is a revelation of what the Oriental thinks and feels not only about things of the earth but about the hidden things of the Universe. It helps us towards a comprehensible knowledge of the Far East.

II.—THE TRANSLATOR

But first a word on the medium through which this extraordinary book reaches us.

Travellers, artists, students, archæologists and history writers, journalists and literary folk, officials and diplomatic dignitaries who wend their way to China by way of Seoul, carry in their wallets letters of introduction to Dr. James Gale.*

For more than thirty years Dr. Gale has been clearing and hewing in a virgin forest, the literature of Korea. He is the foremost literary interpreter to the West of the Korean mind. This is how he regards that mind—the words are taken from an address to a group of Japanese officials who sought Gale's counsel on a memorable occasion:

“The Korean lives apart in a world of wonder, something quite unlike our modern civilisation, in a beautiful world of the mind. I have studied for thirty years to enter sympathetically into this world of the Korean mind and I am still an outsider. Yet the more I penetrate this ancient Korean civilisation the more I respect it.”

No man knows more of Korea or more deeply loves her people, and is loved by them, than Dr. Gale. Japanese officials have also a sincere regard for Dr. Gale. They have been accustomed to carry to him their perplexity over Korean problems, just as the Korean has come to Gale in his troubles with the Japanese. It is because of a combination of social qualities with scholarship that Dr. Gale has been able so convincingly to translate Far Eastern romance and character study.

*

The Rev. James Scarth Gale, son of John Gale, a native of Aberdeen, N.B., and Miami Bradt of Ontario. Born 1863. Published “Korean Grammatical Forms,” 1892; “The Vanguard: a Tale of Korea,” 1894; “Korean-English Dictionary,” 1897; “Korean Sketches,” 1898; ” Korean Folk Tales,” 1913. For ten years was one of the translators of the Bible into Korean. Married, first, the widow of Dr. Heron, Physician to the Emperor of Korea; second, Ada Sale of Yokohama. Presbyterian missionary since leaving the Toronto University.

All the literary interpretative work that Gale has done before the present book—from the fascinating diary of a Korean general of a thousand years ago, who wrote his impressions as he travelled through Manchuria to pay his devoirs at the great court of China, to that literary gem preserved in Gale's translation of the brief Petition of two aged Korean Viscounts, who pleaded in terms of archaic simplicity with the Japanese Governor-General Hasegawa to listen to the plaint of their people for freedom—is so sincere, lucid, and impersonal, that the reader knows that he is being given reality and not an adaptation.

Dr. Gale is the unhurried man who has time for every public behest. Much of the hard literary work of his full day is done in the hours of morning calm before the world has breakfasted. The chief native helper of this quiet-eyed missionary in the work of translation has been with him for thirty years. The unsought, almost unconscious influence of a man like Gale justifies the hopes of the most old-fashioned believers in Christian missions and lends romance to work that too often seems to lead nowhere. Here is the real ambassador in a foreign land: that rare thing the idealist and scholar who has an understanding of the small things of life; the judicially-minded man who makes such deep demands on principle that he draws all men to him.

III.—THE AUTHOR

Writing somewhere of the Korean love of literature, Dr. Gale says: “Literature has been everything in Korea. The literati were the only men privileged to ride the dragon up into the highest heaven. The scholar might not only look at the King, he could talk with him. Could you but read, intone or expound the classics, you might materially be dropping to tatters but still the world would wait on you and listen regardfully to show you honour. Many an unkempt son of the literati has the writer looked on with surprise to see him receive the respectful and profound salutations of the better laundered classes. Korea is not commercial, not military, not industrial, but she is a devotee of letters. She exalts books.”

I hear some traveller say: “What! Do you mean to suggest that those funny chaps I saw in the streets of Seoul wearing baggy white trousers and queer little Welsh hats, who sat around in lazy groups smoking long pipes and looking into nowhere, have a literature? I always understood that the Japanese had an awful time cleaning up their country and getting them to bury their dead. I've always heard that if it weren't for Japanese money and hustle the Koreans would be nothing but walking hosts of smallpox and plague germs.”