Sun-hee's Adventures in the Land of the Morning Sun
A Tale inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland
By Victoria J. Sewell and Byron W. Sewell
First edition, 2016. Illustrated by the authors. Portlaoise: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-78201-172-9 (paperback), price: €13.95, £11.95, $15.95.Click on the book cover on the right to order this book from Amazon.co.uk!
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| “In that direction,” the Tiger said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Scholar: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a Masked Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.” | ||
| “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Sun-hee remarked. | ||
| “Oh, you ca’n’t help that,” said the Tiger: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” | ||
| “How do you know I’m mad?” said Sun-hee. | ||
| “You must be,” said the Tiger, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” | ||
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Foreword |
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| The prospect of publishing another of Byron and Victoria Sewell’s works inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a great pleasure. An Sun-hee’s Adventures Under the Land of Morning Calm was published in English and in Korean translation in 1990; it has long been out of print and is nearly impossible to find anywhere. I am delighted to bring out this new edition, for English-speaking and Korean-speaking readers alike. | ||
| Hangul is an alphabetic script which organizes the letters into syllables, so instead of ㅎㅏㄴ, han is written 한 han. The McCune-Reischauer transliteration (MR) devised in 1937 was widely used and a variant of it is still used in North Korea. In 1995 a new system was developed, published in 2000 and called in English the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR). In Korean it is called 국어의 로마자 표기법 (written Kugŏŭi Romaja P’yogipŏp in MR and Gugeoui Romaja Pyogibeop in RR), ‘Roman letter notation of the national language’. Though there are a number of fine transliteration and transcription details between them, the two systems differ chiefly in their treatment of some of the consonants (ㄱmrk, rrg; ㅋ mrk’, rrk; ㄷ mrt, rrd; ㅌ mrt’, rrt; ㅂ mrp, rrb; ㅍmrp’, rrp; ㅈ mrch, rrj; ㅉ mrtch, rrjj; ㅊ mrch’, rrch) and some of the vowels (ㅓ mrŏ, rreo; ㅕ mryŏ, rryeo; ㅝ mrwŏ, rrwo; ㅡmrŭ, rreu; ㅢ mrŭi, rrui). | ||
| The RR system is promulgated in Korea, though most Koreans seem to prefer to use the older system in romanizations of their names, as in passports and the like. A practical romanization of this sort is found in our heroine’s name: 안선희 An Sun-hee would be mrAn Sŏn-hŭi or rrAn Seon-hui, but the traditional form has been retained here. Other names have been revised to the modern RR standard, though footnotes give the Hangul text and MR reading where necessary. | ||
| —Michael Everson |