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 · 173 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 18 — Letters and Reports 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.
The above. I have humbly received your benevolence. You bestowed a warrant on me as a special favor, changed my appointment to Inspector of the Courier Stations, and ordered me to follow the banners and go west. Though the charge is heavy and hard to bear, my body is light and would fly. It suits my heart, and I hold in it the honor of taking up a dispatch. My mouth is full of the joy of following the army, and chants it. I am ashamed only that, being dim and poor, I bring shame on your encouragement and your pity. Moved by your kindness, I have come to know how deep the sea is. Lifting my foot, I fear only that the ice is thin. Still more, I have none of Sun Qian's picked horsemen, and I liken myself to the small child of Yan Jun. With what shall I split open the springs of affairs and spread abroad your work of virtue? Yet what I wish is to see the dragon fly and the jade sword rise, the leopard pull at the tooth banner, the wind and thunder shake out the sound of a great victory, and the sun and moon light up the fortune of restoration. Then I too may hope that a single word will lengthen my price, that I may become a man of the world above, known and followed for ten thousand miles, and escape being a creature in a pond. Walking, I only leap. Sitting, I pray. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of the honor that sets me clapping and the dread that burns me. Having fasted and bathed, I wait respectfully and set forth my thanks.
Interlinear notes 1
"Known ten thousand li away" is taken with the preceding clause; it may also be read with the one that follows. — translator