Score One for the Dancing Girl, and Other Selections from the Kimun ch'onghwa

"Score One for the Dancing Girl is a delight to read. James Scarth Gale's eloquent and entertaining translations from the Kimun ch'onghwa make a unique contribution to the corpus of translated literature from East Asia." -- Janet Poole, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto "With their detailed, realistic narrations, the stories in Score One for the Dancing Girl offer many insights into the social habits and material life of all strata of society in mid-to late Choson times. King and Park's notes to both the Gale and to the original Chinese language text are excellent." -- Marion Eggert, Department of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-Universit t Bochum

Score One for the Dancing Girl presents more than a hundred stories from an early-nineteenth-century collection of yadam stories, the Kimun ch’onghwa (“Compendium of Records of Hearsay”).

Score One for the Dancing Girl presents more than a hundred stories from an early-nineteenth-century collection of yadam stories, the Kimun ch’onghwa (“Compendium of Records of Hearsay”). Prose tales that feature historical people and places but may also include fantastical elements, the yadam stories in this volume feature ghosts and magic, courtesans and sex, and court politics. They constitute both an entertaining literary collection and a rich treasure trove of information about life in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Korea.

The first volume in an ongoing series of translations of classic Korean literature by the Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937), Score One for the Dancing Girl includes the original literary Sinitic (hanmun) text and Gale’s English translation. Both the hanmun and English are extensively annotated.  Introductory essays by Ross King and Si Nae Park discuss the yadam genre, Gale’s life and career, and the ways in which his background as a Christian missionary affected the translations.