The Tale of Cho Ung Read online

  THE TALE OF

  CHO UNG

  THE TALE OF

  CHO UNG

  A Classic of Vengeance, Loyalty, and Romance

  TRANSLATED BY

  SOOKJA CHO

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Publishers Since 1893

  NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54649-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cho, Sookja translator.

  Title: The tale of Cho Ung : a classic of vengeance, loyalty, and romance / translated by Sookja Cho.

  Other titles: Cho Ung chæon. English.

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006944 | ISBN 9780231186100 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231186117 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PL989.A1 C45713 2018 | DDC 895.73/2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006944

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover image: Iljŏnhaewido, from the series Pukkwan Yujŏk Toch’ŏp, by anonymous artist, ink and color on paper, 31.0 x 41.2 cm, approximately eighteenth century, Korea University Museum

  Book & Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

  To my parents

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Note on the Translation

  BOOK 1

  BOOK 2

  BOOK 3

  Notes

  References

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This translation project is the acme of my teaching and research at Arizona State University. I completed a first draft in December 2012, which is when the real effort began. For the last five years, my spare time has been consumed by reading other old editions, consulting modern Korean collated editions, and revising my translation. Each time I began to flag, I was heartened by the help and support of my wonderful friends and colleagues. I deeply appreciate everyone who provided feedback during this long period.

  In 2015, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea offered its support. It was a turning point for this project, driving me to wrap up long-standing questions and proceed to publication. My heartfelt thanks, therefore, to the institute.

  I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript and have embraced their suggestions as much as possible. I also extend my utmost gratitude to Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press, who immediately saw the value of the manuscript, and to Christine Dunbar, Christian Pizzaro Winting, and Susan Pensak, with whom I have worked closely through the publication process. Their prompt and excellent work has made publishing with Columbia both an efficient and a valuable experience.

  Although I have put my very best into this translation, I trust that it will be improved upon in future. As the project progressed, I realized again and again how much I owe to earlier scholars in the field, most of whom I know only from their books and articles. I have been able to mention only some of these trailblazing works in the present volume. My hope is that this translation will add to the understanding of this popular Korean tale among English-speaking readers and inspire scholars to build upon my work. I look forward to future research on and translations of the Tale of Cho Ung and other popular tales of premodern Korea, which will allow the Western understanding of Korean culture and literature to ripen.

  INTRODUCTION

  One day in the late Chosŏn (seventeenth-nineteenth centuries), a professional storyteller stood in a tobacco store on the main street of Seoul, recounting a heroic tale. One man listened enthralled until, losing track of the line between the real world and the imaginary one, he abruptly leaped to attack the storyteller himself. Recorded in anecdote, the bizarre behavior of this one man illustrates not only the prevalence of public storytelling in late Chosŏn Korea but the depth of Koreans’ personal interest in such stories.1 Those who listened in shops or on the street were the primary consumers of popular tales, although the stories circulated in manuscript form and were later published as commercial novels as well.2 Though almost invisible to modern scholarship, aural audiences were instrumental in shaping these most beloved tales. Reading the stories now transports us into the minds and lives of those popular audiences whose daily experiences engaged them deeply with favorite stories that transmitted wisdom, reconfirmed their norms and values, and helped them make sense of their world.3 The Tale of Cho Ung encapsulates these late Chosŏn Koreans’ passion for stories, allowing us to untangle and hear the multifaceted voices of those earlier Koreans in our modern imagination.

  CHOSŎN BEST SELLER: THE TALE OF CHO UNG

  The anonymously written Tale of Cho Ung (Cho Ung chŏn 됴웅젼 or 趙雄傳) unravels its young protagonist Cho Ung’s journey, interlaced with romance, retribution, and military triumph, as he fearlessly confronts and overcomes obstacles and grows into a heroic man. The tale was the best-selling fictional narrative of the late Chosŏn period. There are approximately 450 surviving copies of different editions in manuscript or print (woodblock and movable-type) form—more than of any other popular narrative from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910).4 The surviving editions are written either entirely in Korean (woodblock print) or in Korean with occasional Sino-Korean characters (manuscript).5 The woodblock-printed versions vary in length and format depending on which printing house produced them. Those from the printing houses in Wansan (present-day Chŏnju) and Seoul are considered the main editions. Those from Wansan comprise three volumes, and those from Seoul comprise only one.6 Although there are minor differences in plot development and descriptions of events among the various versions, the overall narrative remains essentially the same.7

  The Wansan editions are the longest and are considered representative commercial versions (panggakpon 坊刻本), in terms of popularity, quantity, and quality.8 The earliest known edition consists of 104 leaves (70,700 characters) and its first volume dates from the chŏngsa year (1857). These Wansan editions provide an extended, more elaborate version of the tale, laced with descriptive and idiomatic expressions, enriched literary elements, and many popular sentiments common to p’ansori literature. Given that the Wansan area was the center of traditional literary works and publishing,9 it is not surprising that the Wansan editions of the Tale of Cho Ung enjoyed the highest popularity. By contrast, the Seoul editions are generally very short. The longest one, comprising 30 leaves (22,170 characters), is only about one-third the length of a typical individual Wansan edition.10 With an abbreviated treatment of events and many songs omitted, the Seoul editions were clearly aimed at an audience with different tastes. It is difficult to posit any direct relationship between these two editions. Just as the Wansan editions are not necessarily elongated versions of the Seoul editions, so the Seoul editions are not necessarily abbreviated versions of those from Wansan. Indeed, for all their brevity, the Seoul editions sometimes include elaborate scenes not found in the Wansan editions.11

  The recent discovery of the tale’s circulation through the book rental business opens up further dynamics of its multiplication in different editions within the context of the commercialization of reading and printing culture. For instance, a study of the relationship between different editions found that lending (or circulating) library editions (sech’aekpon 貰冊本) from Seoul preceded the Wansan editions and any other commercial versions, hinting that they were the fount from which different tell
ings of the tale sprang and competed with each other for commercial attention.12 The apparently lengthy volumes of these lending library editions also serve to explain some traces of omissions in the surviving editions, suggesting that what we see today is not the whole, original best-selling tale of Cho Ung.

  Despite its wide popularity, revealed by the numerous editions and copies published up to the early twentieth century, the Tale of Cho Ung did not initially attract a correspondingly strong interest among later scholars and audiences. In the new literary and cultural environment, which applied its own standards to canonical literature, the tale’s unique literary value and importance as a best-selling story were gradually forgotten.13 The Tale of Cho Ung was not introduced or researched as much as some tales that enjoyed great popularity in modern times, such as the Tale of Ch’unhyang, the Tale of Hong Kiltong, and the Tale of Sim Ch’ŏng.14 Such gaps between the tale and modern audiences have also resulted in the lack of a complete, readable modern Korean or English translation. Though modern Korean renditions of the tale continued to emerge in the late twentieth century, they were often presented in abbreviated form, as a part of a larger anthology and with a focus on the tale’s didactic message, their dry tone belying the wild popularity of the story over the ages. In recent decades, however, academic and official efforts to promote traditional literary works among Korean and global readers have brought new attention to the Tale of Cho Ung, as has a reprint of the early twentieth-century movable-type edition (Adan mun’go, 2007). The growth of academic and popular interest both in the tale and in classical Korean literature is anticipated at a greater level.

  ORIGINS AND AUTHORSHIP: THE TALE OF CHO UNG IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

  There is little information about the identity of the author of the Tale of Cho Ung. None of the surviving editions or texts offers any evidence. This is not entirely surprising: most vernacular tales from the Chosŏn period were circulated anonymously or under aliases due to the low cultural esteem in which vernacular fiction was held.15 Without a clearly identified author, however, it is difficult to precisely date the original text. It is generally believed that vernacular stories emerged after the ripening of the native Korean alphabet han’gŭl (promulgated in 1446) into a literary language—probably during the seventeenth century—and before the mid-nineteenth century, when surviving commercial editions began to appear on a large scale.16

  The Tale of Cho Ung could have been composed at any time during the two hundred years or so between the inception and the blossoming of vernacular Korean stories. Based on the scale, themes, and the structure of the tale, however, most scholars hold that it probably emerged in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when heroic martial and p’ansori-based Korean novels were in full bloom.17 The fact that there is no record of the tale’s popularity before the nineteenth century also seems to support this view. The first surviving record of Korean military tales (kundam sosŏl 軍談小說) did not appear until the late eighteenth century and does not mention the Tale of Cho Ung, although it does refer to stories such as the Tale of So Taesŏng (So Taesŏng chŏn 蘇大成傳) and Tale of Chang P’ungun (Chang P’ungun chŏn 張豐雲傳).18 This omission suggests that the Tale of Cho Ung was not particularly visible before the late eighteenth century. In examining the surviving editions dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, it therefore seems most likely that the Tale of Cho Ung was written sometime during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

  The tale’s popularity presupposes the presence of the strong historical readership of vernacular literature that began to form during the seventeenth century, when the desire to write and appreciate stories surfaced rapidly among Koreans, triggered by a variety of changing social factors, such as the Japanese (1592–98) and Manchu invasions (1627 and 1636), the development of commercialism, and the emergence of enriched reading materials and writing culture.19 The native Korean script, which was by this time widely used as the literary language, provided the means for common people, especially women, to engage in the practice of reading and writing through the translating, transcribing, and retelling of popular stories in Korean.

  It is often said that Chinese historical novels such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi 三國志演義), the Romance of Chu and Han (Chu Han yanyi 楚漢演義), and the Tale of Xue Rengui (Xue Rengui zhuan 薛仁貴傳), which were imported and circulated during and after the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were instrumental in widening the readership for the Tale of Cho Ung and other Korean heroic martial tales of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.20 These Chinese stories were initially available only to the literati but were soon translated into Korean for a broader audience, by women such as Lady Yun (1647–98), who hand copied a Korean translation of the Romance of Western Zhou (Xi Zhou yanyi 西周演義) to share with her friends.21 This broadening of literary practice, driven by the increased demand for writing in Korean and by the popularity of imported Chinese stories and their Korean translations, as well as the growth of the book market (e.g., rental shops) and print culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,22 all provided a favorable milieu for the composition of new tales in Korean.23 Against this backdrop, the Tale of Cho Ung emerged.

  Experts disagree as to the author’s literary skill and knowledge. Because the tale employs allusions and Sino-Korean poems more often than other military tales with a similar structure, Cho Hŭiung argues that the author must have possessed a considerable literary education and knowledge of Chinese history.24 Based purely on the quality of the writing, however, Sim Kyŏngho argues that the author was a low-ranking official, perhaps a clerk or military officer whose job did not require a high level of literary education.25 Although these two views may seem contradictory, each is valid in its own context. Together they highlight the heterogeneous authorship of the text; while the tale contains sophisticated references that would indicate literati involvement, it also contains unsophisticated sections with fundamental language errors indicative of a more common hand. This juxtaposition demonstrates that the original author was among those who were conversant with the prosody and patterns of military tales, with an average or higher-than-average level of knowledge and understanding of ancient classics and literary works.

  Given that surviving editions may not accurately reflect the work of the original author, it is certainly possible that, for whatever reason, each volume of the original work was rewritten and edited by a different author and then evolved separately or randomly before being combined into a lending library or commercial edition as one complete set. This possibility is also suggested by flaws, simple mistakes, and certain gaps in literary sensibility in the surviving editions.26 Perhaps the rapid success of the tale and concurrent increase in reading and transcribing practices caused a missing part of the original to be replaced in general circulation and then reproduced many times in cheap commercial prints. The first author’s work may have been altered, deleted, or diluted as different versions of the story evolved to meet the demands of popular readers and the book market at large, or to better suit the intellectual and literary expectations of subsequent authors and readers. The extant editions, therefore, may be works of collaboration between authors and readers over time, rather than illustrative of the original author’s qualifications.

  A more detailed examination of surviving editions offers considerable information about the multiple author-readers and their education, literary tastes, and concerns. First, the sources cited in the tale indicate that most allusions in the text are culled from famous events in ancient Chinese history, Confucian classics, and popular historical narratives, such as the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記), the Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經), the Book of Documents (Shujing 書經), and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It is certainly possible that the original author intentionally used such early references because they were chronologically appropriate to the historical setting of the Tale of Cho Ung, which is the Song (Liu) dynasty (42
0–479 CE). It seems more likely, however, that using famous events from well-known texts was a reflection of the knowledge and interests of author-readers of the time; the tale was probably written by and aimed at an audience with an average level of classical Chinese education.

  Second, the tale demonstrates a clear concern with a nonliterati or semiliterati audience. In books 1 and 2 of the Wansan editions, for example, Sino-Korean texts are presented in Korean, with a direct translation following.27 The tale follows the conventions of vernacular literature, in which speaking and singing parts alternate to help narrate the story and express emotions; but further explanations of the quoted Sino-Korean texts also follow their Korean readings. This in-text translation aid illuminates how literature could have been appreciated by nonelite Korean readers such as peasants, artisans, and merchants—people who wouldn’t have received enough literary education to understand or decipher the meaning of the Sino-Korean references.28 This juxtaposition of Sino-Korean text and its translation serves as evidence of the enormous popularity of the Tale of Cho Ung among the illiterate and semiliterate common people of the late Chosŏn period.

  Another fascinating element of the text is the way that changes in the descriptions of battle scenes in successive editions reveal the changing tastes or demographics of successive readerships. Descriptions of military events tend to be omitted or reduced in shorter editions of the tale. Yi Ch’anghŏn proposes that this reduction indicates a decline in Koreans’ interest in the military as time went by.29 Though it would be an oversimplification to suggest that reader tastes correspond directly to gender, if tradition indicates that a military tale engages masculine attention, then the gradual reduction of military scenes may indicate an increased female readership.30