The Nine Cloud Dream

Questions About The Nine Cloud Dream

by Kim Manjung

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I've seen different titles by the same author: "The Nine Cloud Dream" "The Cloud of the Nine" "The Cloud of Dream" Are they all the same books? If so, what is the best translation from the original language? I read somewhere that it's the first Korean novel translated into English.
Lucy Day Werts .
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There are other books with similar titles, but indeed this same classic Korean novel is known by more than one name due to the difficulty of assigni…more.
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There are other books with similar titles, but indeed this same classic Korean novel is known by more than one name due to the difficulty of assigning a definitive English translation to the three-word Korean phrase in the title.

Wikipedia says it's the first Korean novel to be translated into English. I've looked around, but I'm not sure where this claim comes from. The first translation of The Nine Cloud Dream was published by James S. Gale in 1922, but I can't find an authoritative source saying it was the first-ever English translation of a Korean novel.

The James S. Gale translation is now in the public domain and freely available online. There have been two other translations published, one by Richard Rutt in 1974 (which is out of print now) and the 2019 Penguin Classics translation by Heinz Insu Fenkl, which is available for sale as a paperback or ebook.

Gale's translation distorted the original somewhat; Rutt's and Fenkl's are more faithful, in accordance with shifting attitudes towards the role of the translator in an atmosphere of increasing international awareness of world literature.

This page at We Love Translations talks about the novel, its title, and all three of its translations, and has book covers, ISBNs, links to relevant articles, and extracts for comparison:

» What's the best translation of The Nine Cloud Dream?

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