On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 12:57:43 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie
<rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, 10 August 2021 at 19:37:44 UTC+1, jack....@gmail.com wrote:
>> Paul S Person wrote:
>> > On Mon, 9 Aug 2021 10:46:25 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
>> > <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > >Also, Baring-Gould says there is a paucity of werewolf tales from England, because of a paucity of wolves in England. Hmm...
>> >One would imagine sighting a wolf would raise a ruckus even without the supernatural element. Big cats are being reported in the rural US. I'm thinking of some tale of a Korean tiger with an airplane ticket and an incorrect view of the world... I'd want a comedy, but the shape of the tale I'm seeing is a tragedy.
>> >
>> > The reports I've seen (rare as they are -- I think the last one turned
>> > out to actually be a bobcat) locally aren't rural. They aren't even
>> > suburban (well, maybe in Spokane they are); they are urban.
>> >
>> > It is, however, true that most of the reports are from people hiking
>> > in the woods, far from the city, and so can be considered "rural".
>>
>> The local ones have been on farmlands, and have been dismissed as a large dog or small deer.
>> Now, deer downtown, there people have been calmer enough to gather photographic evidence,
>> or we have the physical evidence of a store's shattered window when it leaves.
>
>Ok, are we talking about avoiding wolves, or werewolves,
>or Korean magic tigers?

I appear to have sharpened the focus a bit onto "big cats", ie,
cougars/mountain lions/about 20 other names, IIRC.

Without telling anybody.

Oops!
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 11:37:41 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
<jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:

>Paul S Person wrote:
>> On Mon, 9 Aug 2021 10:46:25 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
>> <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >Also, Baring-Gould says there is a paucity of werewolf tales from England, because of a paucity of wolves in England. Hmm...
>>One would imagine sighting a wolf would raise a ruckus even without the supernatural element. Big cats are being reported in the rural US. I'm thinking of some tale of a Korean tiger with an airplane ticket and an incorrect view of the world... I'd want a comedy, but the shape of the tale I'm seeing is a tragedy.
>> The reports I've seen (rare as they are -- I think the last one turned
>> out to actually be a bobcat) locally aren't rural. They aren't even
>> suburban (well, maybe in Spokane they are); they are urban.
>>
>> It is, however, true that most of the reports are from people hiking
>> in the woods, far from the city, and so can be considered "rural".
>
>The local ones have been on farmlands, and have been dismissed as a large dog or small deer.
>Now, deer downtown, there people have been calmer enough to gather photographic evidence,
>or we have the physical evidence of a store's shattered window when it leaves.

Yeah, I somehow overlooked the farmer reports of depredations on
livestock.

I see occasional references to deer on Nextdoor, but it always seems
to be in the past tense -- as if it happened when the person reporting
it were in a suburban if not actually rural environment.

Gardens around here appear to be mostly troubled by rabbits, or
related critters.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

In article <kgu7hg5epde022734279bj50vpdi4lag71@4ax.com>,
Paul S Person <psperson1@ix.netcom.invalid> wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 12:57:43 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie
> <rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, 10 August 2021 at 19:37:44 UTC+1, jack....@gmail.com wrote:
> >> Paul S Person wrote:
> >> > On Mon, 9 Aug 2021 10:46:25 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
> >> > <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > >Also, Baring-Gould says there is a paucity of werewolf tales from
> >> > >England, because of a paucity of wolves in England. Hmm...
> >> >One would imagine sighting a wolf would raise a ruckus even without the
> >> >supernatural element. Big cats are being reported in the rural US. I'm
> >> >thinking of some tale of a Korean tiger with an airplane ticket and an
> >> >incorrect view of the world... I'd want a comedy, but the shape of the
> >> >tale I'm seeing is a tragedy.
> >> >
> >> > The reports I've seen (rare as they are -- I think the last one turned
> >> > out to actually be a bobcat) locally aren't rural. They aren't even
> >> > suburban (well, maybe in Spokane they are); they are urban.
> >> >
> >> > It is, however, true that most of the reports are from people hiking
> >> > in the woods, far from the city, and so can be considered "rural".
> >>
> >> The local ones have been on farmlands, and have been dismissed as a large
> >> dog or small deer.
> >> Now, deer downtown, there people have been calmer enough to gather
> >> photographic evidence,
> >> or we have the physical evidence of a store's shattered window when it
> >> leaves.
> >
> >Ok, are we talking about avoiding wolves, or werewolves,
> >or Korean magic tigers?
>
> I appear to have sharpened the focus a bit onto "big cats", ie,
> cougars/mountain lions/about 20 other names, IIRC.
>
> Without telling anybody.
>
> Oops!

And while we are at this digression, what about
<https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/discovery-parks-cougar-is-capt
ured-released-into-wild/> (September 7, 2009 date line).

--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_.
-------------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward robertaw@drizzle.com

On Wed, 11 Aug 2021 10:18:20 -0700, Robert Woodward
<robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:

>In article <kgu7hg5epde022734279bj50vpdi4lag71@4ax.com>,
> Paul S Person <psperson1@ix.netcom.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 12:57:43 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie
>> <rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Tuesday, 10 August 2021 at 19:37:44 UTC+1, jack....@gmail.com wrote:
>> >> Paul S Person wrote:
>> >> > On Mon, 9 Aug 2021 10:46:25 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
>> >> > <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> > >Also, Baring-Gould says there is a paucity of werewolf tales from
>> >> > >England, because of a paucity of wolves in England. Hmm...
>> >> >One would imagine sighting a wolf would raise a ruckus even without the
>> >> >supernatural element. Big cats are being reported in the rural US. I'm
>> >> >thinking of some tale of a Korean tiger with an airplane ticket and an
>> >> >incorrect view of the world... I'd want a comedy, but the shape of the
>> >> >tale I'm seeing is a tragedy.
>> >> >
>> >> > The reports I've seen (rare as they are -- I think the last one turned
>> >> > out to actually be a bobcat) locally aren't rural. They aren't even
>> >> > suburban (well, maybe in Spokane they are); they are urban.
>> >> >
>> >> > It is, however, true that most of the reports are from people hiking
>> >> > in the woods, far from the city, and so can be considered "rural".
>> >>
>> >> The local ones have been on farmlands, and have been dismissed as a large
>> >> dog or small deer.
>> >> Now, deer downtown, there people have been calmer enough to gather
>> >> photographic evidence,
>> >> or we have the physical evidence of a store's shattered window when it
>> >> leaves.
>> >
>> >Ok, are we talking about avoiding wolves, or werewolves,
>> >or Korean magic tigers?
>>
>> I appear to have sharpened the focus a bit onto "big cats", ie,
>> cougars/mountain lions/about 20 other names, IIRC.
>>
>> Without telling anybody.
>>
>> Oops!
>
>And while we are at this digression, what about
><https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/discovery-parks-cougar-is-capt
>ured-released-into-wild/> (September 7, 2009 date line).

A blast from the past!
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

Paul S Person <psperson1@ix.netcom.invalid> wrote in
news:kpiahgdpekm3463bgpuaj326fklprcos4q@4ax.com:

> On Wed, 11 Aug 2021 10:18:20 -0700, Robert Woodward
> <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:

>>And while we are at this digression, what about
>><https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/discovery-parks-cougar-is-ca
>>pt ured-released-into-wild/> (September 7, 2009 date line).

> A blast from the past!

Huh.

I have a friend who likes to worry about me, and since I've been
writing a blog about the Seattle parks for more than a year now, she
was very sure I needed warning about a cougar in Discovery Park quite
recently, though I forget just when.

Not that I've ever *been* to Discovery Park - my blog's focus is
North Seattle - and there's no park up here as big, but anyway...

Biggest animal I've seen in this part of the city is coyotes, a few
years ago, on the University of Washington campus. They moved away
from the campus enough to terrify some people, so were all killed,
later.

As this implies, I also haven't been to the Woodland Park Zoo yet,
which *is* in North Seattle but is paywalled.

-- JLB

Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote in
news:3b392b35-4dc0-4d45-9608-0f1a64981be5n@googlegroups.com:

> Among the things Joe Bernstein wrote:

>> I don't know of anything much resembling Western lycanthropy in
>> Korea. No connection to the moon, no vulnerability to silver, no
>> spread by being bitten. There doesn't seem to be anything much like a
>> vampire in Korean legends, but there are lots of dramas about
>> vampires; yet in the one I've so far watched [1], becoming a vampire
>> takes drinking the vampire's blood, not the vampire drinking the
>> human's.

> Quite a bit of modern Western lore came from Curt Siodmak for the
> movie "The Wolf Man" _The Book of Were-wolves_ by S. Baring-Gould
> https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5324
> and possibly _Werewolves_ by Elliott O'Donnell, which I've just run
> across https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26629
> show intermittent connection to a full moon, make only one mention of
> silver in a cure (and allow other cures), and, at a quick search,
> don't mention it spread by bite.

English Wikipedia sv Werewolf has a bunch of references claiming to
cite 19th-century sources for silver, but also claims the moon only
came along in a 1943 movie, and seems to think the bite-spread is
even more recent.

EW sv Werecat doesn't mention Korea. Korean Wikipedia's equivalent
article of course does, but Google Translate doesn't make much sense
of it, and anyway, it doesn't give Korean (or other) cites.

<https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9D%B8%ED%98%B8>

> One would imagine sighting a wolf would raise a
> ruckus even without the supernatural element. Big cats are being
> reported in the rural US. I'm thinking of some tale of a Korean tiger
> with an airplane ticket and an incorrect view of the world... I'd want
> a comedy, but the shape of the tale I'm seeing is a tragedy.

I really like that idea, but first someone would have to convince
Korean TV makers that tigers are viable. It can't be just chance
that Korean TV has abandoned Korean folklore's most common opponent.
It wouldn't shock me if there were some kind of environmental edict
barring the traditional depiction of tigers as stupid but man-hungry.

Korean TV dramas can occasionally pull comedy/tragedy off, but Korean
film is expert at that exact thing. I don't know of Korean movies re
tigers recently *either*, but the financing is totally different, so
maybe easier.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer <Kdeurama@gmail.com>

One week ago, I wrote in part:

> But as it happens, the Korean stories section essentially exists to
> point to written works which read as speculative today, even if they
> weren't originally so intended. In other words, it's actually on-
> topic here.
>
> So I've started this thread to make room for reviews of various
> Korean "folklore" collections and related works.

> So I don't know how many books are in question, but at least four
> men who rendered Korean stories into English died long enough ago,
> and published long enough ago, that both in the US and in countries
> where the Bern convention applies their writings are in the public
> domain.

James Scarth Gale, 1863-1937, grew up in and attended college in
Ontario. He went to Korea shortly after graduating in 1888, as a
missionary with the YMCA; he switched to the US Presbyterian mission
in 1891. He stayed there longest of these four men, both in total
years (nearly forty) and as the latest-present one; all his children
were born there. He worked on the translation of the Bible into
Korean. His Korean-English dictionary is the only one available free
online. [1] He is considered the first translator of Korean literary
works into English (what that makes of Allen, I don't know). His
history of Korea was the last to appear in English before the Korean
War. He moved around a fair amount at first, but ran a church in
Seoul from 1900 to 1927, when he retired to England.
<http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/JamesScarthGale.html>

[1] It uses Hangul, not Chinese characters, but doesn't use the now-
conventional order of the Hangul letters, so it's pretty hard for me
to navigate.
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/ix4TAAAAYAAJ>

His <Korean Folk Tales> is a good book, and as its subtitle - "Imps,
Ghosts and Fairies" - suggests, is full of the fantastical. But its
title is, as far as I know, a lie. What the book is, is translations
of literary texts, written mostly by two yangban men in earlier
centuries, men who are very unlikely to have gone around collecting
folk tales.
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Korean_Folk_Tales/_kpIAAAAIAAJ>
(missing four pages, affecting stories V, XI and XII)
<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51002>
<https://archive.org/details/koreanfolktalesi00impa_0>
<https://archive.org/details/koreanfolktalesi00impa>
<https://archive.org/details/koreanfolktalesi00impa_1>
<https://archive.org/details/koreanfolktalesi00impaiala>

I know far too little about these stories' contexts. I haven't read
significant history of Korean literature in the 15th to 17th centuries
when those men wrote. I know much less than I'd like about Chinese
fiction - in both centuries, Korean literature was essentially all
written in Chinese - specifically Chinese short fiction after the
year 1000. Documentation online of these two men says nothing about
their stories.

That said, I *suspect* both men thought themselves to be working in
existing Chinese fiction traditions, but possibly different
traditions, and certainly working very differently.

Here I'm relying strongly on an analogy. When I first read Euripides
and Aristophanes, I concluded that Aristophanes's critique of
Euripides could be stated thus: "Euripides says the myths are
fantasy. But fantasy is work for comedians, not tragedians, so
Euripides should stop saying that, or stop writing tragedy." In turn,
this enables me to suggest that for Aristophanes, <Lysistrata> was
probably fantasy.

OK, then. Gale cites two sources for his texts. He says he had a
manuscript copy of Im Bang's stories, but got the rest out of a
then-recent Japanese publication. Im Bang is the book's main writer,
but the Japanese article supplied thirteen very short stories by "Yi
Ryuk" (whose name, Romanised nowadays, would probably be written "Lee
Yook") and three anonymous ones. The anonymous ones strike me as
more like Im's than Lee's, so I usually pretend I know them to be the
latest in the collection.
Information about Im and Lee:
<https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9E%84%EB%B0%A9> (Im, 1640-1724)
<https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9D%B4%EC%9C%A1> (Lee, 1438-1498)
Neither article mentions fiction. Im's calls him primarily a poet.

Also, Gale introduces many of the stories with quotes from a
biographical dictionary he had, concerning the people the stories
name. These quotes are often boring, but at least as often not only
narrative but fantastical.

Lee's stories, Gale's XL to LII, fill twenty-five pages, which means
they average *less* than two pages each. One one-page item, XLVIII,
isn't a story at all, but a very short essay. These squibs are
obviously a sort of Ripley's Believe It or Not, Lee telling
everything weird he can think of. I read five as non-speculative,
three as fantastical by our standards if not Lee's, and four as
arguably fantastical. Given my own tastes, it's unsurprising that
the one I like best is the longest, XLVI, three pages with a ghost
sighting the only fantastical element. Something of Lee's
personality seems to me to come through, not one I much like, but
pretty hard to miss. Lee's topics range as widely as his
fantasticality; he doesn't seem to indulge any pet interests in
these stories.

Im is a much better storyteller, though his narrative instincts still
come off as weird to this modern reader. His stories' lengths vary
considerably. Of the thirty-seven, I read six as not fantastical by
modern standards, four as arguably fantastical, and the rest as
flaming fantasy. Im himself I'm not sure about; this distribution
strongly hints to me that he had a category that I understand as
fantasy, and that he preferred to write about, but that doesn't mean
he has to have understood that category as fantasy. He wrote notes
on a bunch of his stories himself, and one makes him sound like he
believes them.

He indulges pet interests galore; most of his stories, though they
vary individually a lot, fall into a few categories, and to a lesser
extent cluster in those categories.

Ten concern people with magical or spiritual powers. II, IV, V, VIII,
X, XI, XIII, XXIII, XXV, XXXII. Of these I like best "The Man on the
Road", XIII, and "Ten Thousand Devils", XXIII.
II and V use as a foil for their main characters an inferior
magician named Jeon Woo-Chi. This guy has been the focus of a 2009
movie and a 2012-2013 TV drama, both of which apparently play up the
latent comedy in these stories into his being a fall guy. The movie
may be here:
<https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.d8a9f78d-e178-64ee-fe80-37cee2346e62/autoplay=1&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb>
The drama seems to be abandoned to the lawbreakers.
<https://wiki.d-addicts.com/Jeon_Woo_Chi>

Nine concern "haunted houses", or the dokkaebi, which Gale calls
goblins, to whom Im attributes most haunted houses. XII, XVII,
XXVIII, XXX, XXXIII, XXXVI, XXXIX. I don't really like any of these,
though XXX, "The Brave Magistrate", is clearly related to the most
famous story none of these four guys introduced in English, "Arang
and the Magistrate".

Five concern transformations. In III, VI, and XXIX, we get a very
tentative introduction of the gumiho (in a story in which a "little
boy" succeeds in picking up and carrying an adult woman!), a
transformed "wildcat", and a vengeful giant snake. In XIV and XVI, a
human instead is transformed, in neither case into a traditional
carnivore.

Four stories feature travel to places Beyond Mortal Ken. II, XXIV,
XXXIV, XXXV. XXIV, "The Home of the Fairies", works for me.

Most of the non-fantastical stories fit into two categories. Five
stories have heroines: in I, XXI and LIII she's a gisaeng, in XIX
and XX she's a yangban. The book's first and last stories are pretty
good by my standards; I, "Charan", isn't fantastical, but LIII, "Ta-
Hong", is at least arguably so. XXI is mordantly comical but very
confusing (Our Heroine, supposedly still a child, has had two
"husbands" already). By my approach, this group suggests that Im
thought virtuous women unlikely.

Three belong to the other non-fantastical category, in which some
poor yangban gets promoted on the basis of ability, virtue or both.
The implication of my approach is that Im thought promotion without
bribery was impossible too. The stories are XVIII, XXVI and XXVII.
The last, "The Fortunes of Yoo", has a complicated enough plot to
work for me. The first is fantastical.

This leaves a few stories that don't fit in any of Im's main groups.
VII, I don't interpret as fantastical, but is obviously uncanny. IX
and XXXI feature divinities, and XXXVIII is clearly fantastical but
just odd.

The anonymous stories are XV, XXII, and XXXVII, Only the middle one
is clearly fantastical (fantasy travel); the other two arguably.

Days ago I wrote, re <Korean Tales> by H. N. Allen:

> He wrote the book in question in 1889, in the US, while working for
> the Korean legation, basically because everyone he met urged him to
> write about his unique experiences. He chose to do so mainly
> through translations. The book has nine chapters in 193 pages.
> <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Korean_Tales/DgeQVx0KS_sC>

Also at:
<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55539>
<https://archive.org/details/koreantalesbeing00alle>
<https://archive.org/details/koreantalesbein02allegoog>
<https://archive.org/details/koreantalesbein01allegoog>
<https://archive.org/details/koreantalesbein00allegoog>

Sorry.

-- JLB

A few days ago, I wrote, in part:

> In 1911 came <The Unmannerly
> Tiger>, Korean stories.

> then in 1922 came a new edition of <The Unmannerly Tiger>

> 1911: <https://books.google.com/books?id=lJrAQ1PeeewC>
<https://archive.org/details/cu31924023266970>
<https://archive.org/details/unmannerlytiger00grifgoog>

> 1922: <https://archive.org/details/koreanfairytales00grif/>
<https://archive.org/details/koreanfairytales_1906_librivox>

Sorry.

-- JLB

On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 23:29:04 -0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<Kdeurama@gmail.com> wrote:

>Paul S Person <psperson1@ix.netcom.invalid> wrote in
>news:kpiahgdpekm3463bgpuaj326fklprcos4q@4ax.com:
>
>> On Wed, 11 Aug 2021 10:18:20 -0700, Robert Woodward
>> <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:
>
>>>And while we are at this digression, what about
>>><https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/discovery-parks-cougar-is-ca
>>>pt ured-released-into-wild/> (September 7, 2009 date line).
>
>> A blast from the past!
>
>Huh.
>
>I have a friend who likes to worry about me, and since I've been
>writing a blog about the Seattle parks for more than a year now, she
>was very sure I needed warning about a cougar in Discovery Park quite
>recently, though I forget just when.
>
>Not that I've ever *been* to Discovery Park - my blog's focus is
>North Seattle - and there's no park up here as big, but anyway...
>
>Biggest animal I've seen in this part of the city is coyotes, a few
>years ago, on the University of Washington campus. They moved away
>from the campus enough to terrify some people, so were all killed,
>later.
>
>As this implies, I also haven't been to the Woodland Park Zoo yet,
>which *is* in North Seattle but is paywalled.

Coyotes are reported, from time to time, on Nextdoor in North East
Seattle.

Mostly as a warning to pet owners to keep their pets indoors at night.

Coyotes, it appears, /love/ cats and dogs.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 23:48:59 -0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<Kdeurama@gmail.com> wrote:

>Jack Bohn <jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote in
>news:3b392b35-4dc0-4d45-9608-0f1a64981be5n@googlegroups.com:
>
>> Among the things Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
>>> I don't know of anything much resembling Western lycanthropy in
>>> Korea. No connection to the moon, no vulnerability to silver, no
>>> spread by being bitten. There doesn't seem to be anything much like a
>>> vampire in Korean legends, but there are lots of dramas about
>>> vampires; yet in the one I've so far watched [1], becoming a vampire
>>> takes drinking the vampire's blood, not the vampire drinking the
>>> human's.
>
>> Quite a bit of modern Western lore came from Curt Siodmak for the
>> movie "The Wolf Man" _The Book of Were-wolves_ by S. Baring-Gould
>> https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5324
>> and possibly _Werewolves_ by Elliott O'Donnell, which I've just run
>> across https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26629
>> show intermittent connection to a full moon, make only one mention of
>> silver in a cure (and allow other cures), and, at a quick search,
>> don't mention it spread by bite.
>
>English Wikipedia sv Werewolf has a bunch of references claiming to
>cite 19th-century sources for silver, but also claims the moon only
>came along in a 1943 movie, and seems to think the bite-spread is
>even more recent.

The Lon Chaney film /The Wolf Man/ came out in 1941 (and so may be the
movie you are referring to) and had /both/ transmission-by-bite [1]
and the influence of the Moon. Also wolfsbane and silver.

[1] Both IMDb and Wikipedia clearly state that Chaney's character was
bitten and so became a werewolf himself.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

I wrote, over a week ago now, in part:

> But as it happens, the Korean stories section essentially exists to
> point to written works which read as speculative today, even if they
> weren't originally so intended. In other words, it's actually on-
> topic here.
>
> So I've started this thread to make room for reviews of various
> Korean "folklore" collections and related works. I have no idea when
> or whether the research library that offers me access to most of
> these works will re-open to the public, nor whether I'll have the
> money to borrow books from it if it doesn't re-open any time soon.

As I've already posted, that library is now scheduled to re-open
September 22. More recently I dug up a page that suggests they're
preparing specifically to re-open to the public:

<https://sites.uw.edu/libstrat/2021/07/21/uw-libraries-reopening-status-update/>

(see the paragraph headed "Preparing spaces:")

One other library usually open to the public isn't going to be so
this fall. The fact that they singled it out leads me to hope that
the East Asia Library *will* open to the public when it comes back
September 29.

> So I don't know how many books are in question, but at least four
> men who rendered Korean stories into English died long enough ago,
> and published long enough ago, that both in the US and in countries
> where the Bern convention applies their writings are in the public
> domain.

Actually five. I've now been reminded of the earliest Korean stories
book to which I *didn't* have access when I first read all this stuff
circa 2018. <Omjee, the Wizard> by Homer Bezaleel Hulbert, 1863-1949,
appeared in 1925. Thus by both the current US system, and the usual
approach to the Bern convention, this book is out of copyright, but
only recently so in both cases, and nobody online has caught up yet.
(The Internet Archive is much the most aggressive site on copyright,
but seems not to know of the book.) There's no local copy, so I
don't know when I'll be able to read it.

I've also been reminded how cool the writer after that, Berta Metzger,
was. Her book came out in 1932, and she lived 1887-1966, so it'll be
years for us in the US and over a decade for the rest of y'all.
Anyway, she worked at the University of Hawaii as a typist, librarian,
and what-all, helping compile a flora but also collecting folktales,
which she retold in the Honolulu newspaper. After these came out as
a book, she went on to stories from other countries, including <Tales
Told in Korea>. After *that* she started globetrotting in various
folk-related ways, including to Korea. There don't seem to be any
good sites about her, but I'm pretty sure I found something cohesive,
probably in some children's books reference. As her story implies,
several of her Korean stories are literary in origin, including the
first English-"folklore" version of a repeatedly dramatised story
that actually *doesn't* always get stripped of its fantasy. She also
has the first English version of a story of a woodcutter who marries
a crane woman, which underlies an episode of "Hometown Legends" I've
watched.

The *next* writer, Y. T. Pyun, 1892-1969, is kind of like Im Bang and
Yi Ryuk, much better known as a politician - he was in Syngman Rhee's
government - than as a story writer. His book, <Tales from Korea>,
1934, is distinctive both as the first story collection in English by
an actual Korean, and because the majority of his stories aren't
fantastical. Unfortunately, it's also the book whose copy at the UW
I damaged, so I'll have to wait, most obviously until Seattle
University's library, whose copy is better bound, re-opens to the
public. Pyun was the first to English "Arang and the Magistrate".

After that comes <Tales of a Korean Grandmother>, 1947, by Frances
Carpenter, 1890-1972. It's the last of six such volumes she wrote.
I remember really disliking this book, but as with Griffis and Gale,
am not sure whether my grounds for doing so hold up. It's the first
to English "Baridegi", though far from the best.

This is quite long enough now, so I'll save the other topic for
another post.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer <Kdeurama@gmail.com>

Over a week ago, I wrote in part:

> But as it happens, the Korean stories section essentially exists to
> point to written works which read as speculative today, even if they
> weren't originally so intended. In other words, it's actually on-
> topic here.
>
> So I've started this thread to make room for reviews of various
> Korean "folklore" collections and related works.

> And one important block of stories is available free online
> in much more recent translations. So I can at least start.

> Pansori is a storytelling musical genre.

Pansori is a sort of improvisational genre. Individual pansori
singers are expected to come up with their own passages in the tale,
and may pass these on to their students, because pansori is also
orally transmitted. (That's why the pansori stories other than the
five popular in the late 19th century are considered "lost" even in
the case of the one for which we have a libretto: that chain of
transmission is broken.) As a result, each pansori story exists in a
set of "lineages".

The pansori stories have been translated, and the translations are
free to the world. And they're in those lineages. Each of the main
five is translated in four versions. Gord Sellar is a speculative
fiction writer living in Korea, and has posted a sort of review of
the translations, including a link that still worked quite recently:

<https://www.gordsellar.com/2017/07/10/pansori-translations/>

Anyone who reads this later, and finds the link broken, write to me;
I have, of course, downloaded the translations.

Pansori seems to have a somewhat strained relationship with streaming
media. I've seen a lot of pansori videos disappear, and don't know
why. But at any given time, there's usually at least one complete
performance of each of the five at YouTube.

What I've found didn't work for me is getting all fancy, and watching
the video with the translation open for reference. I found the
shortest pansori, one of the fantasy ones, established the singer's
lineage, opened the right volume, and wham! I don't read Hangul
remotely fast enough to skip around much, but I wasn't able to link
a single passage with a single thing she sang. Your mileage may, of
course, vary, but forgive me if I doubt that. So my suggestion is
that you don't bother. Watch the videos if you want, but mainly,
read at least some of the translations.

Which is what I'll be doing over the next few weeks, which is why my
own review of the translations will be a while coming.

Anyway, the living stories of pansori:

<Chunhyangga> - A great non-speculative romance story. Allen's
chapter VII. A performance billed as complete by Jung Yoo-Sok:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r5POROszB4> 4 3/4 hours
<Chunhyang> is the one of which, famously, one singer greatly
surprised his audience with an eight-hour version.

The Korean Film Archive has posted presumably legal uploads of at
least three movies of <Chunhyang>:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBX4EKX2ME8> 1961
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saJITTdCv-8> also 1961
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvG8y3bNmgg> 2000
They English-subtitle most of their uploads, though they upload them
first, so probably all of those have subtitles. You may have to sign
in to YouTube, since they age-restrict some of their uploads.

(They've also uploaded an animated "Kongji and Patzzi":
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNMxoST82Og> 1978
And here's a gumiho movie:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al89UmscEPs> 1969)

<Simcheongga> - A somewhat creepy filial-piety story, fantasy.
Allen's Chapter VIII. I find two performances billed as complete,
This appears to be Kim Kyung-Ah:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0r61XE9kWM> 4 1/2 hours
By Jang Moon-Hee:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA3Y7F68Aq4> 5 hours

<Heungboga> - A somewhat moralistic story about a poor brother, a
rich one, and what results from their treatment of sparrows; fantasy.
Allen's Chapter V. For some reason, English Wikipedia insists on
misspelling its title, not only in Roman but also in Hangul script,
so if you want to do a search of your own, flip over to Korean
Wikipedia to get the title. However, uploads of this one currently
available are much older than uploads of the first two cited above,
so you may not need to search.
By Yoo Mi-Ri *and* Lee Joo-Eun, successively:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3G6uriaruk> 2 hours
By Seo Han-Gyul, the first male pansori singer cited here:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pteu4OLQhg> 2 hours

<Sugungga> - Tells of how the turtle convinced the rabbit to visit
the palace of the King of the Sea, and how the rabbit got out of the
resulting trouble. Allen's Chapter III. This is the shortest of the
stories, is the one I've actually watched a performance of, as
mentioned above, and there are currently so many at YouTube that I'll
just give you my search instead of specific uploads:
<https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22%EC%88%98%EA%B6%81%EA%B0%80%22+%22%EC%99%84%EC%B0%BD%22>

<Jeokbyeokga> - A non-fantasy military story based on the Chinese
novel of the <Three Kingdoms>. Not translated by any of our early
guys. Normally sung by men, even now that pansori is mostly women.
Sung by Lee Jin-Woo:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVC4D7FVTjE> 2 1/4 hours
Sung by Yoon Jin-Chul:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67L1s2nScU0> 1 3/4 hours part 1
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIOKRw6LGkk> 1 1/2 hours part 2
Sung by Ahn I-Ho:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyWT7HrHUqE> 3 3/4 hours

Information on the "lost" stories is varyingly scarce, and many
discussions fail to mention the fantastical elements several of these
stories actually have. For example, an otherwise somewhat useful
article at English Wikipedia,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansori-based_fiction>
does so. Few have been translated, but Gale's non-fantastical Im
Bang story XXI is clearly related to one. The most useful print
discussion I've found is in Marshall Pihl's <The Korean Singer of
Tales>, 1994, which according to Worldcat is at a couple of hundred
North American universities and half a dozen US public libraries, as
well as at Project MUSE, ProQuest, and JSTOR. However, what
translations have appeared have come mostly since he wrote. This
post has already gotten long enough; until I can get access to Pihl,
and ideally find web pages I've found in the past, I'm putting these
stories off.

Two other useful books about pansori, in English, are available
online from the South Korean government.
2008 <https://www.gugak.go.kr/site/program/board/basicboard/view?currentpage=2&menuid=001003002005&searchselect=&searchword=&pagesize=10&boardtypeid=24&boardid=13151&lang=en>
2004 <https://www.gugak.go.kr/site/program/board/basicboard/view?currentpage=2&menuid=001003002005&pagesize=10&searchselect=&searchword=&boardtypeid=24&boardid=13149&lang=en>
The most useful book I've found on changgeuk, that is, pansori opera,
is Andrew Killick's <In Search of Korean Traditional Opera>, 2010,
which is at Project MUSE.

So here's the thing: Even after I stopped trying to line up singing
and text in the short pansori I watched, I didn't enjoy it. I'd been
researching pansori for years by that point, off and on, so this came
as quite a surprise to me, but it shouldn't have. Pansori singers
have to train their voices, as do Western opera singers, and as with
Western opera singers, this enables them to do wonderful things, but
also as with Western opera singers, it turns out hours of that just
doesn't work for me, especially without workable translation.

So before I close, I want to point to some of those (shorter)
wonderful things.

The songs that originally interested me in pansori, from the
soundtrack to the fourth K-drama I watched:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4H-Qrd1gTQ>, "Onara", sung by three
schoolgirls
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCW8quM2sY0> Shows them singing it
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8o5Ak7VfEc>, "Sad" "Onara", sung by
an adult woman (in my opinion)

More music by those four singers; though I'm not sure I'd quite call
any of it "wonderful", much is quite good:
The adult, "Lee An", who turned to pop:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfmJDxd7N3c>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAfwqsew4PA>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szUbe7M_xxE> 1/4 hour
The three schoolgirls, re-united 2 1/2 years later:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=332wpv06dH0>
Both Kims have extremely common names, making searches difficult.
The eldest schoolgirl, Kim Ji-Hyeon, the soloist in "Onara", these
days most often attributed "Sad Onara", acted in changgeuks for years,
sang in a soundtrack not at YouTube, then joined a Korean "fusion"
traditional-music girl group; I don't know if she's still with them.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKA-wT6Zcdk>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OC3dGZsoMs>
The middle schoolgirl, Baek Bo-Hyeon, used her work on the drama -
she had a bit part in it, and sang another song solo:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFDnJifcHEs>
- to build a career as a child entertainer,
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYfPeRBePU>
but stopped for high school. She re-appeared after college in a
traditional music video now gone, reciting rather than singing.
The youngest schoolgirl, Kim Seulgi, stuck with pansori proper;
videos of her work appear and vanish randomly, showing mainly that
she has a huge voice, but she also starred in the movie <Duresori>,
resulting in these more stable uploads:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kMWk_jfAs> ten minutes; she's the
soloist in glasses
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqV5_jviYl0>, at the cast party