Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne

Letter presenting poems獻詩啓

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) 桂苑筆耕集 · Choe Chiwon · 886 (Tang, 6th year of the Zhonghe era · Silla, 12th year of King Heongang) · 1 passages · 206 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 17 — Reports to the Throne A collection Choe Chiwon made by choosing out of the writings of his four years in the headquarters of Gao Pian, military commissioner of Huainan under the Tang, binding them into twenty volumes and presenting them to King Heongang of Silla in 886. It holds 366 pieces — memorials and reports sent up to the emperor, the proclamation denouncing Huang Chao, letters to the several military commissioners, orders and dispatches issued to those under him, Daoist and Buddhist texts for services, funeral offerings, records written for the outer wall of Chengdu and for a painting of Annam, and the reports and poems he sent up to Gao Pian. Here is the first report, which begins "I am a man of Silla," and the proclamation against Huang Chao with its line, "Not only do all the men of the world think to kill you openly; the ghosts under the earth have already discussed cutting you down in secret." The last volume holds the poems he made on the voyage home to the country he had left at twelve. It is the oldest collection by a Korean that survives, and when Hong Seokju and Seo Yugu printed it with movable type in 1834 they called it "the root and the beginning of the writing of our Eastern Country." Their two prefaces are translated with it.

1Presenting thirty quatrains that record his virtue

某啓。某竊覽同年顧雲校書獻相公長啓一首短歌十篇。學派則鯨噴海濤。詞鋒則劍倚雲漢。備爲贊頌。永可流傳。如某者。跡自外方。藝唯下品。雖儒宮慕善。每嘗窺顔，冉之墻。而筆陣爭雄。未得摩曹，劉之壘。但以幸遊樂國。獲覩仁風。久貯懇誠。冀伸歌詠。輒獻紀德絶句詩三十首。謹封如別。定王拙舞。適足自嫌。嫫母濃糚。轉爲人笑。不足贊揚休烈。翻憂浼黷尊威。然聖人以激勸誠深。不間互鄕童子。學者以揣摩志切。皆投鬼谷先生。伏惟特恕荒蕪。俯垂采覽。所冀趨仁化於江北。終得傳美譚於海東。唐突藻鑑。下情無任戰慄之至。謹啓。

So-and-so states this. I have privately seen the one long letter and the ten short songs that Gu Yun, a collator and my fellow graduate of the same year, presented to his lordship. In the branches of his learning a whale spouts the waves of the sea. In the point of his words a sword leans on the River of Heaven. He has made his praise complete, and it may be handed down forever. As for one like me, my traces come from an outer region and my art is only of the lowest grade. In the hall of the scholars I have loved goodness and have always peeped over the wall of Yan Hui and Ran Qiu, yet in the battle line of the brush, where men contend for the palm, I have not been able to touch the ramparts of Cao Zhi and Liu Zhen. Only, I have had the good fortune to roam in a happy land and to see a kindly wind, and having long stored up my earnest sincerity I hoped to unfold it in song. So I present thirty quatrains that record his virtue, sealed separately with respect. The clumsy dance of King Ding was enough to make him ashamed of himself. The thick paint of Momu only turned into other people's laughter. These are not enough to praise his fine achievement, and I fear rather that they will stain his honored majesty. But the sage was so earnest and deep in urging men on that he did not keep his distance even from the boy of Huxiang, and learners are so keen in their will to weigh and to polish that they all threw themselves upon Master Guigu. I humbly beg that he forgive what is rank and overgrown and look down and pick it over. What I hope is to hasten toward the kindly transformation north of the Jiang, and in the end to carry a fair tale back to Haedong. I am forward before his mirror of letters. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its trembling. Respectfully submitted.

‹ Poem recording his virtue — the springs of warContentsStatement of thanks for a living allowance ›Listen to this piece