• Translating the T'aengniji:A Review of Inshil Choe Yoon's A Place to Live
• Adam Bohnet (bio)

Thanks to the support of the Academy of Korean Studies, in recent years the quantity of English translations of primary texts in Korean studies has increased enormously. Especially prolific in this respect has been a team of translators assembled by the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA (full disclosure: I am also one of the translators, although I have no connection to the translator of the reviewed work). It is especially welcome that among these texts is the T'aengniji. A literal translation of the title might be "Treatise on Selecting a Village," but the translator's title, A Place to Live, is short, striking, and memorable. The author, Yi Chung-hwan (1690–1756), was a marginalized member of an aristocratic yangban family who was pushed into exile on account of factional politics. A Place to Live, which he likely completed during the early 1750s, is a geographic account of eighteenth-century Chosŏn written with the purpose of helping fellow yangban aristocrats select a good place to live. After an introductory survey of the Chosŏn's system of social status, Yi [End Page 569] surveys the eight provinces of Chosŏn mostly according to administrative districts. This he follows with a series of discourses on such subjects as "geomancy" and "economic potential."

This is a text of enormous value to modern scholars; indeed, it has been used extensively already. It also would be useful for teaching Korean history, and in fact I used a section of it in class this October. The translator, Inshil Choe Yoon of the University of Auckland, is no novice to the field: her PhD dissertation was a translation of a portion of the T'aengniji with scholarly commentary. She has already published this dissertation and articles on the complicated history of T'aengniji manuscripts.¹ This current translation is a revision of earlier work combined with new translations of previously untranslated sections. It provides a complete translation into English of this highly important text for the first time.

The translator's introduction is relatively short, at slightly less than thirty pages. For me, as a teacher, this seems to be the perfect length—enough to provide context but not so long as to attempt to predetermine the reader's understanding of the text. The section on the textual history of the book and reception during the late Chosŏn period, an issue in which the translator has shown considerable interest, is especially informative. One weakness in this introduction, however, is an uncritical dependence on the concept of Sirhak or "Practical Learning." As the author indeed recognizes, the concept of Sirhak is a modern term (21) used to categorize those late Chosŏn scholars who were interested in statecraft and are thus now seen as more practically oriented than the orthodox Zhuxiist scholars. However, it is also an ideologically charged concept, originating with the independence activists of the 1930s and gaining a new lease on life during the 1960s, when the study of "practical learning" was used to provide evidence of the internal capacity of Korea to achieve modernization without being colonized by Japan.² Although I myself find it impossible to avoid the category entirely, it suffers from a number of maladies, including a tendency to simplify Chosŏn tradition by dividing it into a failed, impractical, and reactionary majority camp and a progressive, forward-thinking, empirical, [End Page 570] and practical minority camp. There has also been an unfortunate tendency to evaluate Chosŏn thinkers according to their (generally superficial) resemblance to European thinkers, who are thus implicitly treated as the standard.

Choe Yoon's introduction does not escape these maladies completely. For instance, at the very beginning of the book, she writes the following:

The T'aengniji (Treatise on choosing settlements) begins with a seemingly innocuous statement: "In ancient times there was no scholar-gentry...

• 翻译T'aengniji：Inshil Choe Yoon的《居住的地方》评论
• 亚当·博纳特（生物）

得益于韩国研究学院的支持，近年来，韩国研究中主要文本的英文翻译数量已大大增加。在这方面特别多产的是由加州大学洛杉矶分校佛教研究中心组建的翻译团队（充分披露：我也是其中一位翻译，尽管我与审阅作品的翻译没有任何联系）。在这些文献中尤其是“ T'aengniji”是非常受欢迎的。标题的字面翻译可能是“选择村庄的故事”，但译者的标题“ A Place to Live”简短，醒目且令人难忘。作者李宗焕（1690–1756）是贵族羊板的边缘化成员由于派系政治而流亡的家庭。他可能在1750年代初完成了一个居住地，该地域是18世纪Chosŏn撰写的地理记录，目的是帮助扬班族贵族选择一个好的居住地。对Chosŏn的社会地位系统进行了介绍性调查后，Yi [End Page 569]主要根据行政区域对Chosŏn的八个省进行了调查。在此之后，他针对“风气”和“经济潜力”等主题进行了一系列论述。

这对现代学者来说具有巨大的价值。实际上，它已经被广泛使用。这对于教授韩国历史也很有用，事实上，我在今年10月的课堂上使用了其中的一部分。奥克兰大学的翻译家Inshil Choe Yoon对这个领域不是新手：她的博士学位论文是对T'aengniji的一部分进行翻译的，并附有学术评论。她已经发表了有关T'aengniji手稿的复杂历史的论文和文章。¹当前翻译是对先前工作的修订，并结合了先前未翻译部分的新翻译。它首次提供了这一非常重要的文本的完整英文翻译。

译者的简介相对较短，略少于三十页。对我而言，作为一名老师，这似乎是最完美的长度，足以提供上下文，但又不能试图预先确定读者对课文的理解。在Chosŏn晚期，有关书本文字和接受历史的部分，翻译者表现出极大的兴趣，这一问题尤其有益。但是，此介绍中的一个弱点是对Sirhak或“实践学习”概念的不加批判的依赖。正如作者确实认识到的那样，Sirhak的概念是一个现代术语（21），用于对那些对治国之道感兴趣的后来的朝鲜学者进行分类，因此，现在这些人比正统的朱西主义学者更切合实际。但是，它也是一个意识形态上的概念，起源于1930年代的独立活动家，并在1960年代重新获得了生命的生命，当时，通过“实践学习”的研究来证明韩国实现内部能力的证据。没有被日本殖民的现代化。²尽管我本人认为无法完全避免使用该类别，但它却遭受了许多弊端，包括倾向于通过将其分为失败的，不切实际的和反动的多数派，以及渐进的，前瞻性的，经验主义的来简化Chosŏn传统的趋势。 ，[结束页570]和实用的少数民族营地。还存在一种不幸的趋势，即根据他们与欧洲思想家（通常是肤浅的）的相似之处来评估乔恩思想家，因此，欧洲思想家被隐含地视为标准。

Choe Yoon的介绍并未完全摆脱这些弊病。例如，在书的开头，她写道：

T'aengniji（选择定居点的条约）始于一个看似无害的说法：“在古代，没有士绅。