|
|
Peter Kornicki’s “The Monk at the Bottom of the Well: Tangyin bishi 棠陰比事 (Judicial Cases under the Sweet-pear Tree) in Seventeenth-century Japan” analyzes a collection of Chinese detective stories that reached Japan as a result of the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592–1598 and were then vernacularized. Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) was the first to engage with Tangyin bishi, copying out a Korean edition and adding his own vernacular reading marks (kunten 訓點). Later, Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴 (1642–1693) created a Japanese version that he domesticated by adding the word Honchō 本朝 (“This country,” namely, Japan) to the title. Several other vernacular versions of this work were produced in the seventeenth century. This chapter considers the vernacularizing strategies used by Japanese scholars and the particular reasons for Japanese interest in this text.
Tuấn-Cường Nguyễn’s “The Reconstruction and Translation of China’s Confucian Primers in Vietnam: A Case Study of the Pentasyllabic Poetry for Primary Education” traces the evolution of a work known in Vietnamese as the Ấu học ngũ ngôn thi 幼學五言詩 (Pentasyllabic poetry for primary education). This primer, based on several Chinese textbooks—mainly the Shentong shi 神童詩 (Poetry of precocious children), the Xunmeng youxue shi 訓蒙幼學詩 (Poetry of primary education for instructing the ignorant), and the Zhuangyuan shi 狀元詩 (Poetry for the first-rank scholar)—was supplemented by several new poems composed in Vietnamese. The text was originally written in literary Sinitic and then translated into vernacular Vietnamese (the nôm script) in both prose and verse versions. The result was a hybrid work that did two things: One was to bring Vietnamese primary education into what the author calls the “Sinographic cosmopolis” in East Asia; the other was to produce a set of texts that reflected “Vietnamese characteristics” in terms of their form, language, and script.