Yetgeul › Korea

Dongmyeongwang Pyeon (The Lay of King Dongmyeong)東明王篇

Yi Gyubo · 1193 · Korea · 6 entries · 4,737 Chinese characters

An old-style poem in 280 five-character lines, with its preface, made by Yi Gyubo in 1193, when he was twenty-six. It sings of Haemosu, who came down from heaven and won Yuhwa, daughter of Habaek; of Yuhwa, who took in the light of the sun and bore an egg; and of Jumong, born from that egg, who left Buyeo, crossed the river on a bridge of fish and turtles, and founded a kingdom. Longer than the poem are the inline notes set between its lines — Yi Gyubo copied out, just as they stood, the passages that Kim Busik "cut down a great deal" in making the Samguk Sagi, taking them from the Basic Annals of King Dongmyeong in the Gu Samguksa, a book no longer handed down. The contest of shapes in which Haemosu and Habaek turn into carp and otter, pheasant and hawk, and the passage where Yuhwa's lips are drawn out three cheok long, survive in these notes alone.

Only the Lay of King Dongmyeong, which stands at the head of volume 3 of the first collection of the Dongguk Isangguk Jip, was taken out and translated (22 paragraphs, 39 notes, 4,737 graphs). The source text is one block of preface and one block of poem; the poem runs its 280 lines on in a single line, so it was cut at the twenty-one places where the story turns and gathered into six entries. Not one graph was added or taken away, and the original item against the source text, and the source text against the translation, were matched graph by graph and confirmed to differ by zero. The author's own notes set between the verses were taken out of the lines and placed in order in the notes column. The two graphs ▣▣ in the preface are blank in the source text as well and are left as they are. Personal names are read with their Korean sounds (Haemosu, Yuhwa, Jumong, Geumwa, Songyang, Yuri).

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