SIJŎN CHŎNGMUN 詩傳正文

SIJŎN CHŎNGMUN 詩傳正文 [main text of the Classic of Poetry].

Manuscript on paper, annotated throughout in black, blue, & red ink. 3, 20, 20, 20, 20, 8; 20, 20, 20, 18 folding leaves. Two kwŏn in two vols. Small folio (342 x 213 mm.), orig. semi-stiff wrappers with decorative stripes & handwritten title on upper covers (slightly stained & rubbed), old stitching. [Korea: after 1775].

This handsome large-format Korean manuscript is a sola scriptura version of the Classic of Poetry, richly annotated throughout with exegetical, lexical, and grammatical (sundok-kugyŏl 順讀口訣) glosses, in a mix of hanja and han’gŭl. The unusually extensive handwritten marginalia provide a rare glimpse into how a reader in Chosŏn Korea interpreted and vernacularized a Literary Sinitic text.

The chŏngmun 正文 editions of the Confucian Classics were commissioned by King Chŏngjo (1752-1800) of the Chŏson dynasty in 1775. As his edict to the officials observed, “many have commented upon the Three Classics and the Four Books, under the names ‘transmissions,’ ‘elucidations,’ ‘notes,’ ‘explanations,’ ‘studies,’ or ‘commentaries’.” These commentaries, which seemingly commanded importance above that held by classical texts themselves, were “cacophonous despite their plentitude,” and were often confused, if not mutually contradictory. Taking as models the “Stone Classics” (Ch. shijing 石經) of antiquity, King Chŏngjo ordered an edition of the Three Classics (Changes, Documents, and Poetry) and the Four Books to be printed without any commentary whatsoever, and in so doing produced an edition that differed — functionally and visually — from the typical scholarly edition, in which original texts of the classics are buried under layers upon layers of philological and exegetical commentaries. This succinctness — King Chŏngjo hoped — would better allow the Classics themselves to reveal their meanings (Chŏngjo, “Gyŏngsŏ chŏngmun yŏn’gi” 經書正文緣起, in Hongjae chŏnsŏ 弘齋全書).

The resulting sola scriptura editions of the Classics, printed in 1775 with the imjincha 壬辰字 metal type, likely formed the basis of the present manuscript copy of the Classic of Poetry, written in a beautiful semi-cursive hand. The text of the manuscript follows the Classic of Poetry as presented in Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1139-1200) influential Shijizhuan 詩集傳 edition, but with greatly reduced commentaries. The main text is copied in a hand-drawn frame of ten lines per half-leaf (doubled for commentary), 21 characters per line, double lines around edges, white mouth and single black fishtail, with running title to upper p’ansim. Leaves are paginated in cycles of 20 (see collation above). The small kugyŏl glosses to the right of the main text (see below), in black ink, appear to be in the same hand as the main text. The second hand, writing in blue ink, extensively annotates the text in two ways: the interlinear glosses translate difficult terms using a mix of hanja (Chinese characters) and han’gŭl (Korean alphabet), and the exegetical comments in upper margin and at end of verses concern the literary qualities of the text, explicating the significance of particular terms and summarizing the effect of individual verses. The third hand, in red ink, punctuates the text and blue-ink marginalia, underlining terms and phrases for emphasis.

Late-Chosŏn manuscripts heavily annotated for vernacular reading are much less common than their contemporary Japanese counterparts, and they are invaluable sources for understanding how actual Korean readers of the time grappled with Chinese texts. Particularly notable in our manuscript is the presence of sundok-kugyŏl glosses, a system of annotating the Chinese text for vernacular reading unique to the Korean context. “As a system of vernacular reading, kugyŏl uses a grammatical transcoding algorithm that shows the reader how to parse a literary Sinitic text in the vernacular language...And it almost certainly inspired the Japanese kunten 訓点 (interpretive marks) that sustained premodern Japanese literacy. Both kugyŏl and kunten marks indicate reading by gloss — because they visualize for readers how to apply the necessary grammatical particles and verb endings (or cases and inflections) of the vernacular language to allow recitation...

“Glossators until the twelfth century sometimes used simple dots and lines adjacent to sinographs, using either a dry stylus or ink, but by far the most pervasive and long-lasting practice was the use of a set of abbreviated sinographs, known as kugyŏl graphs (kugyŏlcha 口訣字), which were brushed in ink onto a preexisting manuscript or imprint...

“Interpretive glossing gave way to what we today call ‘consecutive glossing’ (sundok kugyŏl 順讀口訣), or ‘phonetic glossing’ (ŭmdok kugyŏl 音讀口訣), around the thirteenth century. Consecutive glossators used only the right side of text columns, providing only cases and inflections and freeing the text of any prompts for word-order switches. Interpretive glossing requires the reader’s eyes to cross over columns of texts and move forward and backward repeatedly because the kugyŏl engages in word-order trans-coding that renders subject-verb-object into subject-object–verb. By contrast, consecutive glossing encourages linear reading movement by skipping word-order transcoding and thus treating object-verb as a single unit. The difference between interpretive glossing and consecutive glossing is that the latter expects readers to have internalized to a greater degree the grammatical structure of literary Sinitic.”–Si Nae Park, “The Sound of Learning the Confucian Classics in Chosŏn Korea,” HJAS 79, Nos. 1/2 (2019): pp. 145 & 149.

Very good condition, some light marginal worming has been traditionally repaired. Red collector’s seal reads 岩佐氏圖書印.

The chŏngmun edition of Poetry is very rare outside of Korea. We find only the Columbia copy in WorldCat (accession no. 35216408).

❧ On Korean glossing practices, see also Peter Kornicki, Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia (Oxford: 2018), pp. 168-71. John Whitman, “The Ubiquity of the Gloss,” SCRIPTA 3 (2011), pp. 95-127.