Yetgeul › Korea

Bohanjip (A Supplement to Jottings to Break Idleness)補閑集

Choe Ja · 1254 · Korea · 4 volumes · 39,997 Chinese characters

A collection of talk about poetry that carries on from the Pahanjip. Choe U commanded that "the book is not broad enough; carry it on and patch it," and Choe Ja made this. He weighs up Yi Gyubo, Yi Illo, Yu Seungdan and Kim Ingyeong one by one, and sets side by side the many poems men made on a single title to argue who differs and how. How the world of letters in Goryeo saw itself is left here just as it was. This is where the tale of the dog of Osu is first written down, and here too is a record of one paulownia seen on the old site of Gaegyeong after the Mongols burned it. To the last volume he deliberately added eight strange tales — set down, he wrote, "that new men who study hard may roam a little and rest a little."

The preface and all 3 volumes, 149 paragraphs, fully translated. The only unit of division is the volume, and the entries have no names of their own, so rather than inventing titles that are not there, a volume was taken as an entry and an entry as a paragraph, as with the Pahanjip. The graph counts were matched against the source text volume by volume, and all four volumes were confirmed to differ by not a single graph (39,993 graphs). The source text does carry a textquality 25% mark, however — it means a keyed-in text that has not been matched against the original item by item, so places where the graphs differ may remain. For the collations added by the editor of the source text ({{校}}), the earlier graph of the source text is kept in the original and the sense was construed with the correction only in the translation.

Book Three
Book Two
Book One