''The Cloud Dream of the Nine'' (

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...

: 구운몽,

Hanja Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom. (, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, wh ...

: 九雲夢) by

Kim Man-jung Kim Man-jung (Hangul: 김만중, Hanja: 金萬重; 6 March 1637 – 14 June 1692) was a Korean novelist and politician. He was one of the eminent Neo-Confucian scholars of the Joseon period. Life and work A member of the '' yangban class'', K ...

is a 17th-century Korean novel set in the Chinese

Tang Dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...

(although there have been some arguments about whether Kim was the original author ). It has been called “one of the most beloved masterpieces in Korean literature." It was the first literary work from Korea to be translated into English, by

James Scarth Gale James S. Gale (February 19, 1863 – January 31, 1937; in modern Korean 제임스 스카스 게일, in old Sino-Korean characters 奇一 (기일)) was a Canadian Presbyterian missionary, educator and Bible translator in Korea. Early life Gale was ...

in 1922.

Richard Rutt Cecil Richard Rutt CBE (27 August 192527 July 2011) was an English Roman Catholic priest and a former Anglican bishop. Rutt spent almost 20 years of his life serving as an Anglican missionary in South Korea, a country for which he developed a d ...

's 1974 translation is entitled ''A Nine Cloud Dream''. In 2019, Penguin Classics published a new translation by Heinz Insu Fenkl entitled ''The Nine Cloud Dream.'' ''The Cloud Dream of the Nine'' is written in a philosophical style, expressing Confucianist and Buddhist concepts. In the preface of the book (first written in 1922), Elspet K.R. Scott describes the book as being about the romance of polygamy; others believe that it is meant to be a cautionary tale about the illusory nature of Earthly delights and the fleeting nature of the fulfilment of "libidinous drives". The oldest existing text of the book was written in

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

.Sources of Korean Tradition: from the sixteenth to the twentieth ... - 2000 -- Page 10 "... deliberately blurred the line between the real and the imagined (A Nine Cloud Dream). Those seventeenth-century stories may have been originally written in classical Chinese, but hangul versions were circulating by the eighteenth century, "

In popular culture

Uhm Jung-hwa Uhm Jung-hwa (; born August 17, 1969) is a South Korean singer, actress and dancer. Uhm is considered to be one of the most influential women in the Korean entertainment industry, finding rare success in both music and film. Her legacy and car ...

's 2017 studio album ''The Cloud Dream Of The Nine'' is named after the novel.

External links

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References

Buddhist novels Joseon dynasty works 17th-century Korean novels Novels set in the Tang dynasty Chinese-language novels of Korea {{17thC-novel-stub