Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

What will 2017 bring us?  Here at Lotus & Persimmon, there are many plans afoot.  I will continue to bring you blog posts about art and culture from around the East and Southeast Asian region, of course.  2017 will also see the launch of L&P's retail operations.  Launch date: 4 July.  As we get closer to that date, the nature of the blog posts will change as retail products become the focus.  

I also plan to start work on translating a rare early book about Korea:

  

As far as I can make out, La Corée (1883) is one of the first books about Korea in a European language to be written and published after the opening of Korea's ports to international commerce.  It seems to have been part of a series of monographs on Asian and African countries put out by the now-defunct French Geographic Society.  

It's heavily reliant for its information on another French book published almost a decade earlier, Charles Dallet's History of the Korean Church (1874), which was the first European book about Korea since Hamel's captivity narrative appeared in Dutch more than 250 years earlier:

The picture above shows the shows the frontispiece of the original book reproduced in a recent edition of the Korean translation.  I am the co-translator with Prof Gary Ledyard of Volume I of this work as well.  Regrettably, it's still in manuscript as we have been unable to find a publisher.  

Why are these works in French, you may wonder?  In short, it's because French missionaries were covertly active in the so-called Hermit Kingdom for more than 40 years before visitors of any other nationalities arrived.  The missionaries' letters and other writings are the main source material for these 2 books.  Oddly, no one's ever thought to translate them before.  Perhaps that's because earlier generations of Anglo-American scholars would have had a reading knowledge of French.

In any case, my plan is to serialize La Corée, which I'm simply going to call Korea, on the blog.  I will post chapters as I complete them.  

Please come back regularly to read blog posts, and please, PLEASE come back in the summer to look at the one-of-a-kind artworks and vintage/antique artifacts that will be for sale from 4 July.  Images of some of them are in fact already visible elsewhere on this site.  If you're not already doing so, please 'like' and follow the Lotus & Persimmon page on Facebook, and also the Lotus & Persimmon gallery on Instagram.  

I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2017! 

Posted on 03/01/2017 by David Gemeinhardt Books 0

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