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Part of
Key Cultural Texts in Translation
Edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Adriana Şerban and Fransiska Louwagie
[Benjamins Translation Library 140] 2018
► pp. 203–218

Chapter 12
Reproduction and reception of the concepts of Confucianism, Buddhism and polygamy

Kuunmong in translation

This article investigates how the pre-modern Korean cultural concepts “Confucianism”, “Buddhism” and “polygamy” as represented in Kuunmong, a Korean novel supposedly published in 1689, were reproduced by two English translators with different religious backgrounds and writing in different periods, Reverend James Scarth Gale (1922) and Bishop Richard Rutt (1974); it is also my aim to examine how the concepts were introduced, explained, and received in the target culture. While Gale’s translation reveals a favorable attitude toward Buddhism and polygamy prevailing in the text, Rutt tended to reinterpret and reconstruct those practices in a more critical way. I suggest that this difference may be related to the different social milieu at the times of translating, readers’ expectations, translators’ individual opinions, as well as factors relating to the publishers, reflective of the different agential network in translation.
Keywords: Buddhism, Confucianism, Kuunmong , polygamy, translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Confucianism, Buddhism and polygamy: Key cultural concepts in pre-modern Korea
  • 3.Representation of Confucianism, Buddhism and polygamy in translation
  • 4.Reception of Confucianism, Buddhism and polygamy
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.140.12cho
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Texts analysed
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2.James Gale’s unpublished introduction to The Cloud Dream of the Nine, in Gale Scarth Papers , University of Toronto.
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