A Discussion in Outline of the Matter of the Running Brush (走筆)論走筆事略言
夫唱韻走筆者。使人唱其韻而賦之。不容一瞥者也。其始也。但於朋伴間使酒時。狂無所洩。遂託於詩。以激昂其氣。供一時之快笑耳。不可以爲常法。亦不可於尊貴之前所爲也。此法。李湛之淸卿始倡之矣。予少狂。自以爲彼何人予何人。而獨未爾耶。往往與淸卿賦焉。於是乃始之。然若予者。性本燥急。移之於走筆。又必於昏醉中乃作。故凡不慮善惡。唯以拙速爲貴。非特亂書而已。皆去傍邊點畫。不具字體。若其時不有人隨所下輒問別書于旁。則雖吾亦莽莽不復識也。其格亦於平時所著。降級倍百。然後爲之。不足以章句體裁觀之。實詩家之罪人也。初不意區區此戲之聞于世矣。乃反爲公卿貴戚所及聞知。無不邀飮。勸令爲之。則有或不得已而賦之者。然漸類倡優雜戲之伎。或觀之者如堵墻。尤可笑已。方欲罷不復爲。而復爲今相國崔公所大咨賞。則後進之走筆者。紛紛踵出矣。但此事初若可觀。後則無用。且失其詩體。若寢成風俗。烏知後世有以予爲口實者耶。其醉中所作。多棄去不復記云。
Now what is called 「calling the rhyme and running the brush」 (唱韻走筆) is to have a man call out the rhyme and to compose upon it, leaving not so much as the space of a single blink of the eye. At its beginning it was only this, that when friends were drinking together and there was nowhere to let out the mad spirit in them, they lodged it at last in poetry, roused that spirit up, and made of it a merry laughing matter for the hour. It cannot be made a constant practice, nor is it a thing to be done before the high and honorable.
This practice was first set going by Yi Damji (李湛之), Cheonggyeong (淸卿). In my youth I was mad enough to say to myself, 「What kind of man is he and what kind am I, that I alone should not be able to do it?」 and so from time to time I made such pieces together with Cheonggyeong. It was thus that it first began.
Yet one like me, being hasty by nature, carried the thing over into the running brush, and composed, moreover, always in the midst of a dark drunkenness. Therefore I weighed nothing of good or bad, and prized only being quick, though clumsy. Not only did I write in confusion, but I left out all the dots and strokes at the side and did not complete the shapes of the characters. Had there been no one at the time to ask at once as the words came down and to write them out separately at my side, even I myself would have been lost and unable to make them out again. Their very level, too, I set down a hundred degrees below what I compose at ordinary times before I made them, so that there is nothing in the phrasing or the form to be looked at. In truth I am a criminal among poets.
At first I had no thought that this trifling game would become known to the world. Yet instead the great lords and the royal kinsmen came to hear and know of it, and there was none who did not have me brought in and made to drink and press me to compose; so that there are pieces I made unwillingly. But it grew ever more like the skill of a mountebank's miscellaneous play, and at times those who looked on stood round like a wall, which was the more laughable. I was just about to stop and do it no more, when again the Chief Minister, Duke Choe, praised it greatly, so that among the younger men those who run the brush come forth in confusion one after another.
Only, this business seems at first worth looking at, but afterward it is of no use, and besides it loses the proper form of poetry. If it gradually becomes the custom, who knows but that there will be those in later ages who take me for their excuse? Of the pieces I made in drunkenness, I commonly let them go and did not write them out again.