The Cloud Dream of the Nine

The title page of Gale's translation

The Cloud Dream of the Nine (九雲夢, Hangul 구운몽) by Gwangsan Kim clan's Kim Manjung is a 17th-century Korean novel set in Tang Dynasty China.^[1] It was the first literary work of Korea to be translated into English, by James Scarth Gale in 1922. Richard Rutt's translation is entitled A Nine Cloud Dream.

It is not known whether The Cloud Dream of the Nine was written in Chinese and translated into Korean, or vice versa.^[2][3][4][5]

References

1. Kuunmong: The Cloud Dream of the Nine Manjung Kim, James S. Gale "a story of true faith tested by worldly ambition, set in Tang Dynasty China; a love story, and a classic expression of Confucian values in conflict with Buddhist beliefs."
2. Ian Philip McGreal Great literature of the Eastern World: the major works of prose 1996 Page 429 "One proclaims that The Cloud Dream of the Nine was originally written in Korean and later translated into Chinese. The other insists on the opposite view, arguing that the oldest extant woodblock version that can be found today is written in ..."
3. Peter H. Lee Sourcebook of Korean Civilization: From the 17th century to the ... 1996 -- Volume 2 - Page 11 "Koreans still wrote poetry in classical Chinese, conforming to rigid Chinese rhyme schemes, but they also wrote more and ... and novel-length stories that deliberately blurred the line between the real and the imagined (A Nine Cloud Dream)."
4. Peter H. Lee, William Theodore De Bary Francisca Cho Bantly Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in The Dream of the Nine Clouds- 1996
5. 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, "