The 612 Day-Long Odyssey

A Transcription of 'The Journey to the West' in Colonial Korea

Kim Young and Barbara Wall

The Journey to the West can be counted among the most popular narratives in the world. One of its most widely referenced versions is the Chinese novel Xiyou ji, written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Over the course of its one hundred chapters, this novel tells the story of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who protects the Buddhist monk Tripitaka during his odyssey from China to the Western Heaven in search of the real Buddhist scriptures. Tripitaka is modelled after Xuanzang (c. 602–664), probably the most famous among the Chinese monks travelling to India ‘in search of the dharma’. The Journey owes its popularity in large part to its innumerable versions, which span varied times, cultures, and forms of media. We recently discovered, in the Deep Rooted Tree Museum (Ppuri Kip’ǔn Namu Pangmulgwan) in Sunch’ǒn in Southwest Korea, a hitherto unnoticed Korean version of The Journey in the form of a manuscript from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Over the course of almost two years, an unknown scribe had copied out a Korean translation of The Journey (Kor.: Sŏyugi) from over 400 newspaper issues and thus in effect produced a multi-volume manuscript. What may have been his motivation?

The manuscript we found in the Deep Rooted Tree Museum (Ppuri Kip’ǔn Namu Pangmulgwan) consists of 22 sections, incorporated in 20 volumes (Fig. 1). Each section contains between 52 and 86 folios. Consisting of 57 or fewer folios each, sections five and six as well as sections 12 and 13 are fused together to form volumes five and 11, respectively. Each volume presents with the same format and layout. The scribe used ruled paper from various paper manufacturers, and the manuscripts are bound in traditional yellow book covers made from several layers of paper. Safflower, sesame oil and beeswax were commonly used not only to create the yellow colour of the covers, but also to protect the books from humidity and insects. While traditional Korean side-stitched books were produced using five stitches, the Sunch’ǒn manuscript shows only four stitches. This is not altogether surprising, for it was precisely towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that four stitches became more widely used in Korea, probably due to influences from China and Japan, where four stitches were standard. Many Korean book covers are decorated with a design printed by means of woodblocks. The cover pages of the Sunch’ǒn manuscript are decorated with a pattern of swastikas leaning slightly to one side (hard to recognize on the photos, unfortunately). While the swastika is often associated with a Buddhist context, here it is a simple case of its being one of the most popular patterns on Korean book covers in the nineteenth and twentieth century, regardless of the books’ content.

The manuscript is written primarily in Korean, using the Korean alphabet Han’gǔl. However, the writer randomly added Chinese characters to names or titles and also used Chinese characters for the titles on the covers of each volume, followed by the volume’s number. To the far right of the cover pages it is indicated that the whole manuscript consists of 20 volumes. Although the name of this manuscript’s writer is unknown, we do know from its colophon that the version he (or, very unlikely, she) copied out was a Korean translation of The Journey that had appeared in over 400 issues of the newspaper Chungoe Ilbo, that is almost daily from 15 February 1929 to approximately the end of October 1930 (Fig. 2).

It is not clear whether the ending of The Journey actually appeared in Chungoe Ilbo. The newspaper had to pause its publication between late October 1930 and February 1931 due to financial problems, and many issues are missing from the archives. The last available episode of the newspaper version of The Journey, episode 421, stems from 4 October 1930. It references the title of chapter 97 out of the one hundred chapters that form the sixteenth century Chinese novel it was translated from. The transcribed manuscript on the other hand tells the story through to the end and also maintains a consistent format and style throughout. The fact that the scribe wrote the colophon to his manuscript on 24 October 1930 suggests that the ending of The Journey was published in the now missing issues of Chungoe Ilbo and that the scribe was indeed able to copy the text until its very end.

Predominantly, the scribe copied the contents as they were, with the exception of some paratextual and orthographical differences. The version in the newspaper is titled New Translation of the Journey to the West. The translator introduces himself with the pseudonym ‘Mister Journey to the East’, and each episode is complemented by illustrations. In contrast, the manuscript is simply titled Journey to the West and mentions neither the translator’s name nor does it include any illustrations. Furthermore, the newspaper spells the chapter headings of the novel in Chinese, albeit often incorrectly: Sometimes turning the Chinese characters upside down, sometimes cutting out characters, or adding characters that do not belong to the headings at all. Trying to make sense of this character jumble when it occurred, the writer of the manuscript added Korean translations to the titles in Chinese. The results are often quite amusing. For example, in chapter 28 of the sixteenth century novel, the first half of the chapter heading reads, ‘Free of his peril, River Float (Tripitaka) arrives at the kingdom’ (脫難江流來國土). River Float is one of Tripitaka’s pseudonyms, since his mother had abandoned him as a baby and set him afloat on a river. The manuscript writer, however, does not seem to be aware of this pseudonym, misunderstanding it as the name of a river. He also appears to be confused by several incorrect Chinese characters in this heading (脫靴江流來國士) and ends up producing the nonsense translation, ‘The Take-off-one’s-shoes River flows, a scholar of national rank arrives’ (Fig. 3).

We can assume that the scribe was trained in traditional orthography at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century, for in contrast to the newspaper version he leaves no spaces between words. Moreover, he uses the more traditional ‘lower a’ (ㆍ, area-a), although the newspaper had chosen ‘upper a’ (ㅏ, wis-a) for its publication of the novel. The manuscript is written with a brush in black ink from beginning to end. On its final page, the scribe states that it took him a challenging 612 days to finish the transcription. What might have been the motivation for transcribing such a long text when it had already been published in print?

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, which means that the scribe decided to transcribe the novel’s translation from the newspaper deep in the midst of colonial rule. While all of the manuscript is in Korean (Fig. 4), the scribe added a colophon in Literary Chinese on the final page. From these last lines we can therefore gather that the author was not only a talented calligrapher, but that he was also trained to write in Literary Chinese. 

There may have been practical reasons for the project. One explanation would be that the scribe might have wanted to possess The Journey ‘in one piece’, or in 20 volumes, rather than as a collection of more than 400 newspaper clippings. It is possible that the scribe had not even had continuous or permanent access to the newspaper, which would have been the case if he had borrowed it from a friend or read it at a library. In this case, the manuscript would have been much more useful than the original printed publication. The fact that we can now access the entirety of episodes via the manuscript, while many issues of Chungoe Ilbo are missing, supports this hypothesis. The transcription might have also been religiously motivated. We know that transcribing holy texts was, and still is, a popular method to accumulate religious merit in many cultures. Thus, the transcription may have been motivated by the Buddhist nature of the text. We know from other Korean manuscripts of The Journey that readers were encouraged to read and copy the text as a way to accumulate merit on their way to enlightenment. 

Another explanation that comes to mind is that the writer took up the challenge of copying the translated novel because he spiritually connected his own circumstances with the ‘spirit’ of the story. After all, did he not emphasize in the colophon that it took Tripitaka more than 5000 days to fight against countless demons? We know from the story that the monk finally reaches his goal and attains enlightenment. In this regard, the hopeful message of the story might have appealed to the Korean people during Japanese colonial rule. Supporting this assumption is the translator’s pseudonym, which means ‘Mister Journey to the East’ and seems to play with the title of The Journey to the West. While circumstances force both translator and scribe to ‘travel’, that is to look towards, the colonial powers in the East, both the newspaper publication of the novel as well as the transcribed manuscript indicate that a solution lies rather in the opposite direction, so symbolically in the West, where the pilgrims of The Journey find enlightenment or independence. And this may also be the reason why the scribe emphasizes his admiration for this journey towards the West just before the colophon, in the last Korean sentence of the manuscript, which reads:

References

• Kim Young (2017), ‘Chungguk sosǒl Sǒyugi pǒnyǒkpon ǔi Chosǒn hugi yut’ong e kwanhan yǒn’gu’, Chungguk ǒmun nonyǒk ch’onggan 40, 95–122.

• Kong, Eva Lüdi (Trans.) (2016), Die Reise in den Westen, Stuttgart: Reclam.

• Paek Tu-hyŏn (2015), Han’gǔl munhŏnhak, P’aju: T’aekhaksa.

• Park Jae-yeon (2010), ‘Keimyung Taehakkyo sojang han’gǔl p’ilsabon pǒnyǒk kososǒl Syoyugǔi yǒn’gu’, Chungguk ǒmunhak nonjip 60, 459–494.

• Wall, Barbara (2017), ‘Deconstruction of Ideological Discourses: Ch’oe Inhun’s Sŏyugi (The Journey to the West) as a Parody of Xiyouji (The Journey to the West)’, Acta Koreana 20/1, 281–306.

• Wall, Barbara (2019), ‘Dynamic Texts as Hotbed for Transmedia Storytelling: A Case Study on the Story Universe of The Journey to the West’, International Journal of Communication 13, 2116–2142.

Description

Deep Rooted Tree Museum (Ppuri Kip’ǔn Namu Pangmulgwan)
Material: Paper, 20 volumes
Dimensions: 27.5 × 19.5 cm
Provenance: Korea, 1929–1930

Reference note

Kim Young, Barbara Wall, The 612 Day-Long Odyssey: A Transcription of The Journey to the West in Colonial Korea
In: Wiebke Beyer, Karin Becker (eds): Artefact of the Month No 4, CSMC, Hamburg,
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/aom/004-en.html