Introduction

The title of this chapter is inspired by Ge Liangyan's wonderful study of the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. Ge's book tackles various questions of vernacularization and the rise of a new literary vernacular in late imperial China through the lens of what he calls ‘the Shuihu complex’ and its eventual crystallization in Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳. But whereas Ge's title alludes to generic and societal margins – the marginalized position of xiaoshuo 小說 narrative in traditional China and the liminal social status of the protagonists in The Water Margin – my focus here is literally on the margins of the page, whether printed or (more especially) manuscript. And my focus is on late-Chosŏn Korea (1392-1897) and its encounter with precisely the sort of literary vernacular Sinitic that Ge studies in his book.

The title of the conference at which this chapter was first presented was ‘Accessing “Baihua” in Korea and Vietnam, with a Focus on the Reception of the Xixiangji’, but please note the scare quotes around the problematic term ‘baihua’ 白話. As so many researchers have been quick to point out, the terms baihua and wenyan 文言, as well as their alleged antagonism in earlier times, are twentieth-century inventions and legacies of the May Fourth movement. Harbsmeier reminds us that ‘the term baihua is as modern as the term wenyan.

By one count, as many as two hundred different works of late imperial Chinese fiction found readers in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Among them, only four titles – Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (The Water Margin), Xixiangji 西廂 記 (The Romance of the Western Wing), Xiyouji 西遊記 (The Journey to the West), and Sanguozhiyanyi 三國志演義 (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms), the first three of which overlapping with the ‘four masterworks of the Ming novel’ – gave rise to reading aids known as ‘sosŏl ŏrokhae’ 小說語 錄解 (‘glossaries of colloquialisms found in [Chinese] vernacular fiction’). Previous researchers have argued that fiction glossaries helped Chosŏn readers to grasp the meaning of words that are difficult to understand (nanhaeŏ 難解語). Their argument is that fiction glossaries emerged in response to the spread of Chinese vernacular fiction (paekhwa sosŏl 白話小 說; ‘fictional works written in a plain style’) in Chosŏn, where the educated population acquired literacy in Literary Sinitic (hanmun 漢文) without any knowledge of spoken Chinese (hanŏ 漢語) and therefore lacked knowledge of plain Chinese (paekhwa 白話). First introduced in the 1930s, this standard explanation continues to hold sway even though it offers only a partial picture of the cultural significance of fiction glossaries and the late Chosŏn literary landscape that fostered them.

Introduction

In 1714-1715, the renowned Japanese Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂 徠 (1666-1728) published Yakubun sentei 譯文筌蹄 (A Tool for Translation, editor's note 1711), an aid for Sinitic studies. In the ‘Prefatory Remarks in Ten Principles’ (Daigen jussoku 題言十則) to this work, Sorai offered his views on ‘Chinese language’ (Chūka gengo 中華言語):

What did Sorai mean by ‘Chūka gengo’? Both the term gen and the term go suggest a spoken component. The character gen 言 (Ch. yan) stresses spoken words and go 語 (Ch. yu) means words to state or to conversate. The supposed written traces of the vanished spoken words are also called gen or go. By using gengo rather than bun 文 (Ch. wen; pattern, writing, composition), Sorai was emphasizing speech rather than writing.

In the early period of the Russo-Sino-Japanese triangular relationship, language transformation was one of the pivotal effects to emerge from the introduction of Russian literature into East Asia. As Karen Thornber points out, ‘The many versions of baihua (the new written vernacular) that proliferated in China in the 1920s were hybrids not only of classical Chinese, the premodern vernacular, and contemporary colloquial speech but also of Japanese and western syntactical structures.’ Most scholarly discussion of language reform in China has focused on the negotiation between China and Western European languages; however, new insights can arise when we turn to the often-overlooked role of the Russian language in East Asian language reform.

The translation of Russian texts was one of the earliest and most crucial ways that Japanese and Chinese writers engaged with the Western world. The introduction of Russian literature into East Asia tested the ability of Japanese and Chinese translators to work at the limits of their own languages’ intelligibility. Many aspects of the Russian language could not readily be translated into Japanese or Chinese; meanwhile, those languages had developed an integrated system of self-presentation, honed over thousands of years of practice, which made it less amenable to abrupt cultural change. On the other hand, though, the attempts to reconcile them led to literary innovation in both Japanese and Chinese.

Introduction

What constitutes a translation is always subject to norms within a given language community. As Theo Hermans observes, the term translation ‘appeals to a recognizable and circumscribed category, both a known concept and a socially acknowledged practice’. Ever since Roman Jakobson's seminal division of translation into ‘intralingual’ (rewording), ‘interlingual’ (translation proper), and ‘intersemiotic’ (transmutation) approaches, scholars have sought to define translation through both prescriptive and descriptive methods. While the lion's share of such scholarly efforts has been devoted to interlingual translation in European-language contexts, some scholars have sought to place practices of translation on a continuum of practices of ‘rewriting’ across all three of Jakobson's categories. Most famously, perhaps, André Lefevere argued that what he termed ‘rewriters’ – a terms designed to capture the breadth of translational activities – constituted the ‘motor force behind literary evolution’, subject to ideology and poetic aesthetics.

In a recent surge of interest in intralingual translation, scholars have paid more attention to how practices of translational rewriting shaped the transition to modern written standards within modernizing empires and nation-states. Such investigations show that the emergence of modern written forms of language was not only mediated through interlingual forms of rewriting but also depended heavily on intralingual approaches. Such rewriting involved the translation of ‘classical texts’ into modernized written ‘vernaculars’ while accommodating new ways to bridge ‘speech’ in its geographically distinct formations within the newly evolving written standards.

Introduction: Sinitic literacy, translation, and Mun Hanmyŏng

The Story of the Western Wing 西廂記 is a thirteenth-century northern play attributed to Wang Shifu 王實甫. Reprinted repeatedly in a rich assortment of critical editions, the play remained the most popular reading matter throughout late imperial China. Reaching Chosŏn Korea as early as 1504, the play seemed to have drawn Korean scholar-officials’ attention mostly in a seventeenth-century edition bearing Jin Shengtan's 金聖歎 (1608-1661) ‘Sixth Genius Book’ commentary, according to records that mentioned elite Chosŏn men of letters such as Yi Sanghwang 李相璜 (1763-1849), Yi Mansu 李晚秀 (1752-1820), and Pak Chega 朴齊家 (1750-1805). But these records are typically couched in critical terms in tune with the political environment under the rule of King Chŏngjo 正祖 (r. 1776-1800), whose stern stance on reinvigorating Confucian classical learning and resisting what was considered frivolous styles in casual prose and fiction from China was exemplified by what modern literary historians have often called a Rectification Campaign 文體反正 following the term coined by Takahashi Tōru 高橋亨 (1878-1967).

For example, the Northern Learning scholar Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋 (1741?-1793), in his letter to Pak Chega, dismisses Pak's obsession with The Western Wing as mere folly – yet this critique is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Yi Tŏngmu had also been reprimanded by Chŏngjo for having imitated the casual prose style in his own writings.

Introduction

Tuồng (also called Hát bội) is a form of traditional theater that was widespread in central and southern Vietnam from the eighteenth century onward, reaching the height of its popularity in the nineteenth century. It began to decline in popularity in the early twentieth century, partly owing to the appearance of Cải lương (Reformed theater) in the 1920s and, later, the introduction of other forms of entertainment such as popular music and cinema. From a comparative perspective, Tuồng is a subgenre within traditional East Asian drama along with traditional Chinese dramatic genres such as Yueju 粵劇 (Cantonese Opera) and Chaoju 潮劇 (Chaozhou Opera) as well as Japanese Noh 能 (Noh theater). The scripts of classic Tuồng are written in (chữ) Nôm (𡨸) 喃, the logographic writing system of the Vietnamese language, which dates back to the fourteenth century at the latest and was used until the early twentieth century. Some of the themes in Tuồng plays are of indigenous origin and involve the transformation of local sources such as folktales and legends of the supernatural, but other plays display foreign literary influences from Ming and Qing historical fiction, Chinese scholar-beauty romance novels, French novels, as well as Chinese and Indian religious (mainly Buddhist) tales.

Tuồng, like many other types of traditional theatrical performance in the world, arose in the context of religious rituals.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi) has enjoyed a broad readership in its original format and in various adaptations throughout East Asia for centuries, and Japan is no exception. A complete translation of the text into Japanese was published as Tsūzoku sangokushi [A Popularized History of the Three Kingdoms] in Kyoto between 1689 and 1691, the second complete translation of the text to be realized, following the Manchu version roughly four decades earlier. The book was an immediate hit, with other translations quickly emerging to ride the coattails of its success. The tremendous popularity that Tsūzoku sangokushi enjoyed and the deep impression it made on the reading public are evident in the numerous digest versions, cross-media adaptations, and even irreverent parodies that proliferated in various genres through the end of the Edo period and beyond. Nearly a century and a half after its appearance, the translation had lost none of its vitality, for its text was used, essentially unchanged, as the basis for Ehon tsūzoku sangokushi [A Popularized History of the Three Kingdoms: An Illustrated Book], published in the late 1830s. Adorned with some 400 exquisite illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai's disciple Katsushika Taito II, the new presentation of the now classic translation soon became a bestseller, its more accessible format bringing the work into the hands of an even wider audience.

Introduction

In this volume we have brought together essays that examine various aspects of interlingual transactions within East Asia. Some of the essays stretch the meaning of the notion of ‘translation’ in interesting and challenging ways and suggest that Roman Jakobson's tripartite distinction between intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation may need to be rethought. Part of the challenge resides in the fact that, contrary to the nationalistically inflected binaries of ‘script’ vs. ‘orality’ or ‘domestic’ vs. ‘foreign’ advanced in twentieth-century political and scholarly discourses, such categories prove to be remarkably porous and permeable within the early modern language ecologies of East Asia. Thus, this volume is part of a broader conversation that seeks to dismantle certain ready-made assumptions about the nature of the Chinese language, the Chinese literary corpus, and the cultural engagement of countries within the Sinographic sphere.

The need for a new mapping of the web of translational interactions becomes particularly acute as we take stock of the fact that early modern China's literary culture operated in a plurality of linguistic forms. Moreover, these varieties of written Chinese exceeded the reformist May Fourth divisions between languages that were reputedly ‘outmoded’ or ‘new’, ‘dead’ or ‘alive’. As Chinese intellectuals sought to fashion a new written medium that could accommodate modern content and be readily learned by a mass public, they divided written Chinese into so-called ‘literary’ (wenyan文 言) Chinese and ‘vernacular’ (baihua 白話) Chinese, while revamping the entire literary canon to align with these new linguistic divisions. ‘Literary Chinese’ was reputedly divorced from any spoken forms, encompassed the bulk of the Confucian classics and the much-maligned examination essays, and as such was thought to represent a ‘dead language’ that impeded modernization. The ‘vernacular’ allegedly hewed closely to a spoken idiom, was newly aligned with the ostensibly ‘popular’ forms of traditional fiction, drama, songs, and some poetry, and represented the foundation upon which a new written standard could be established.

However, as more recent scholarship has shown, this opposition between ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ Chinese is profoundly misleading because historically, the so-called ‘vernacular’ was neither the proximate counterpart to any spoken form of Chinese nor was it an exclusively popular form of writing. On the contrary, what distinguished this form of writing – which has alternatively been called ‘vernacular’, ‘plain Chinese’, or ‘mixed-register literature’ – was its encyclopedic capacity to blend registers drawn from different strata within literary Chinese.

In the area of eighteenth-century Japanese sinology, few biographies trace dominant trends in translation and literary history more closely than that of the Nagasaki-born translator, Okajima Kanzan 岡島冠山 (1674-1728). As a commercial interpreter, language instructor, and aspirant literatus, Kanzan participated in the earliest wave of vernacular Chinese translation in Edo-period Japan, and his literary activities embodied the intersection of scholastic, moral, and commercial imperatives characterizing early eighteenth-century Japanese interest in Chinese narrative. A Chinese language instructor at the prestigious Miscanthus Academy of Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666-1728), Kanzan was privy to the private thoughts and public pronouncements of the period's most influential interpreters of China, and he was involved by implication in a nexus of debates about Japan's cultural position vis-à-vis China. As an educator, Kanzan left a remarkable legacy in his series of dictionaries focused upon the usage of ‘contemporary Chinese language’ (Tōwa 唐話). Finally, and most importantly for the scope of this chapter, Kanzan was the author of several original compositions in contemporary Chinese – an unusual venture for a man barred by historical circumstance from ever visiting China, and an enterprise demanding a creative reinterpretation of cultural and epistemological boundaries between Japan and China.

In this essay, I examine Kanzan's ambitious but ultimately incomplete magnum opus, the Taiheiki engi 太平記演義 (A Chinese Explication of the ‘Annals of Pacification’).

Though Ireland was never properly a part of the Roman Empire, it was a part of the Roman frontier. The extent of exchange and interaction with Britain and the Continent justifies our consideration of Ireland in the context of Late Antiquity as early as the third century CE. Elva Johnston has noted that the fifth century has served as ‘a chronological boundary’ and, as a result, ‘early Irish historical scholarship is greatly invested in analyzing conversion, Christianization and changing religious affiliations’, rarely treating the earlier period. Johnston has challenged the tendency of Irish historians to view Ireland as isolated from the Roman world and has argued that it should be viewed in a comparative context and as a frontier of the Empire. She writes of Roman frontiers that ‘They are no longer viewed as lines on a map, as hard borders defended by large-scale fortifications … instead they are seen as zones of complex cultural, economic, and military interaction’. The influence and reception of Roman, Gallo-Roman, and Romano-British culture along Irish transmarine frontier zones is witnessed in the archaeological record and includes decoration, ornament, and, of greatest significance to the current study, literacy, ogham being the primary example.

It is clear now that Christianity and its literate culture arrived in Ireland at an early date, likely by way of Roman Britain. The Romans had arrived in what they would call the Roman province of Britannia as early as 55 or 54 BCE, as Julius Caesar reports in his Gallic Wars. However, the Roman presence would not endure until 43 CE when Roman emperor Claudius, in front of 200,000 soldiers, invaded the island from the south. The Romans would gradually take control of much of Britain over the coming decades. The Roman presence in Britain was naturally to spread to the near neighbours in Ireland.

The archaeological evidence shows that the Irish were involved in maritime trade with Romano-British and Spanish traders, and perhaps even traders from the Mediterranean world, as early as the later fourth or early fifth century CE. Burials in the Roman fashion, found scattered along the eastern coastal region, provide evidence that Romans may have resided in Ireland as early as the first or second century CE.

The Hisperica famina (‘Western Orations’) (hereafter Hisperica) are a seventh-century collection of fascinating, Latin orations that constitute a school textbook on rhetoric and composition. Similar to several other extant ‘hisperic’ texts written in a unique form of Hiberno-Latin, they invoke neologism and archaic vocabulary, draw on Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic, and employ terms in unique ways. Their influence was widespread, and a number of insular compositions are believed indebted to the hisperic style they demonstrate. For example, Máeldub likely imparted knowledge of the Hisperica to Aldhelm while he was a student at Malmesbury, and their influence is evidenced in his De virginitate, Aenigmata, and epistle to Eahfrid. Due to their gratuitous artificiality, deliberate obscurity, extreme invective, and outlandish style an argument can be made that the Hisperica are evidence of the continuation of the so-called ‘third sophistic’ that developed in the late antique and early medieval west. Or, perhaps they could be placed alongside other hisperic texts in a ‘Celtic’ or ‘Insular’ sophistic in the seventh and eighth centuries. Second Sophistic rhetoric in the Latin ‘Silver Age’ tended towards heightened, superficial style, bombast, and strange vocabulary, including graecism and archaism, and later writers are sometimes identified as part of a third sophistic. Rather than evidence of a decline in literary and rhetorical style, the rhetoric of the second and third sophistic reveal the social and cultural values of the learned classes from which it emerged, and hisperic style reveals much about the stylistic values of the early medieval Irish. Aside from the exemplary studies discussed below, hisperic Latin has in large part escaped the notice of rhetorical studies.

The A-Text of the Hisperica likely dates to the mid-seventh century and is certainly the work of an Irish milieu. As a terminus post quem, Andy Orchard suggests the writings of Isidore, indicating composition in the first half of the seventh century at the earliest, and a terminus ante quem based on the writings of Aldhelm, who appears to imitate them in his fixed patterns of syntax, indicating the late seventh century. Michael Herren also argues that the Hisperica influenced the Lorica of Laidcen (d. 661 CE), providing further evidence for a late seventh-century date. As for the text's Irish provenance, P. Grosjean was the first to note the influence of Irish on some of the faminator's coinages, and most commentators now agree the text is an Irish production.

The history of rhetorical traditions in Ireland is one that is slowly forming but that offers much promise. The scope of the vernacular and Latin learned tradition from the seventh century forward is wide-ranging, including grammars, learned handbooks, letters, liturgical texts, hagiography, lawtexts, genealogy, lore of place-name, verse, and pseudo-history. As primary scholarship advances new editions and translations, the door is opened for scholars in adjacent fields, and Ireland should no longer escape the attention of rhetorical studies. Below, I briefly review some of the texts mentioned in the preceding chapters only as a representative sample of areas ripe for rhetorical inquiry.

The writings of Columbanus offer important insight into rhetorical education in the sixth and seventh centuries not only in Ireland, but in continental centres of learning. In addition to his letters, sermons, and hymns, there remain unedited and untranslated manuscripts associated with Columbanian circles on the continent, works associated with rhetorical learning, and more that is yet to be discovered. Several hagiographic works, including the Life of Columbanus (and the writings of Adomnán generally) and the Latin and vernacular lives of Patrick, will also prove to be of value in our pursuits, as epideictic and other rhetorical genres inform their composition. The examples from early Ireland are plentiful, and such studies are wanting.

There are a number of Irish learned Christian poems that demonstrate a special interest in language, especially, ‘Versus Cuiusdam Scotti de Alphabeto’, ‘Aipgitir Chrábaid’, ‘Interpretatio mystica progenitorum Domini Iesu Christi’ of Ailerán the Wise, De Mirabiilibus sacrae scripturae, and the Carmen Paschale. Though these poems have in part been the subject of stylistic studies, much remains to be done regarding linguistic theories preserved therein, including the rhetorical.

The grammatical texts discussed also deserve further study. All of these, with the exception of the learned vernacular text, Auraicept na nÉces (‘The Scholar's Primer’) (the edition of which is incomplete) remain to be translated, though they are all now edited. The Auraicept is perhaps the most important as it is a vernacular learned handbook informed by the tradition of Latin grammatica, but rhetorical theories can also be detected. The Insular Latin grammars are all of interest, but Vergilius Maro Grammaticus's grammar proves of special interest to rhetoric, as he specifically discusses rhetorical theory.

The Libri Epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, the Book of Letters of St. Patrick the Bishop, is the name Ludwig Bieler gave to St Patrick's opuscula, including the Confessio and the Epistola ad milites Coroticus. Bieler constructed his edition from eight surviving manuscripts of various date but dates the exemplar to the fifth or sixth century, though the earliest surviving version was copied c. 800 in what is now known as Book of Armagh. This codex, including the Psalter, Gospels, the entire New Testament, the Liber Angeli, and the Lives of St Patrick and St Martin, as well as Patrick's writings, was written to be the personal devotional book of Toarbach, coarb of Patrick. In the manuscript, the Patrician texts begin: Incipiunt libri sancti Patricii episcopi (‘Here begins the book of St Patrick the bishop’). This section of the Book of Armagh is the work of two scribes, including the Armagh scriptorium's master scribe, Ferdomnach, and they represent incomplete versions of the Epistola and Confessio.

While the earliest manuscripts do not appear to have survived, the eight surviving manuscripts are believed to accurately represent the original exemplar, as the copies were not influenced by the romantic style of the early Bardic tradition in Ireland. Concerning this matter, Ludwig Bieler argues,

Bieler's thesis is widely accepted and has helped to set aside concerns that the manuscripts, copied over several centuries, are tainted by the rhetorical, stylistic, grammatical, and thematic tendencies of redactor context. The version of the Confessio in Book of Armagh, however, does leave out an important section on Patrick's childhood sin. However, considering the propagandistic ends to which the early manuscripts were put by the hagiographers Muirchú and Tírechán in order to claim superiority for the ecclesiastic community at Armagh, that the Libri Epistolarum remained mostly unchanged is remarkable.