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

A memorial thanking him for the loan of a barge謝借舫子狀

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 · 126 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 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.

1Now I have escaped the stranded fish and taken hold of the painted heron

客司奉傳處分。借賜舫子安下者。某方脫窮鱗。得攀畫鷁。自慙跡在塵吏。忽訝身爲水仙。則彼甘寧割錦纜而呈奢。顧愷毁布帆而無恙。豈若榮棲德宇。又泛仙舟。風波無失所之憂。煙月有搜吟之暇。況淸流滿望。暑氣銷威。每當定志安神。則乃銘肌刻骨。謹課七言長句詩一首。齋沐上獻。干瀆台堦。下情無任荷戴兢惕之至。謹狀。

The office of guests conveyed your order. You lent me a barge and settled me there in comfort. Now I have escaped the stranded fish and have taken hold of the painted heron. I am ashamed of myself that my traces lie among the clerks of the dust, and I am startled that my body has suddenly become an immortal of the waters. Gan Ning cut his brocade mooring rope and made a show of his extravagance. Gu Kaizhi tore his cloth sail and came to no harm. How could either of these match nesting in honor within a house of virtue, and floating besides on an immortal's boat? In wind and wave there is no fear of losing my place, and in mist and moonlight there is leisure to search out verses. Still more, a clear current fills the whole view, and the summer heat loses its power. Whenever I settle my will and calm my spirit, I engrave this on my flesh and cut it into my bones. I have respectfully composed one poem in long seven-word lines. I have fasted and bathed, and now present it, sullying your high steps. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude for your kindness and its dread. Respectfully submitted.