Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne
Poem recording his virtue — shooting the whip七言紀德詩 射鞭
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.
1Standing firm on the field of battle
休說戟枝非易中。若言楊葉是難穿。須看立節沙場上。永得安邊爲射鞭。
Do not say that the branch of a halberd is not easy to hit. Do not say that a willow leaf is hard to pierce. Look rather at how he stood firm on the field of battle: the frontier was made safe for good, and it came of shooting the whip.
Interlinear notes 1
為 is taken as "to be," tying the line to the poem's title "Shooting the Whip." It can also be read as "because he shot the whip." — translator