Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 18 — Letters and Reports

Letter seeking a post for the licentiate Pei of my patron's house與恩門裵秀才求事啓

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 · 147 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 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.

1For Pei Liao, second cousin of the examiner and vice minister

某伏念身托德門。光生異域。雖池蛟得雨。無沈埋末路之憂。而海燕含泥。有點汚畫梁之罪。跡賤而兢惶倍切。恩深而展效何期。豈合更寫卑誠。仰塵尊德。但以事非獲已。情或可哀。不辭鈇鉞之誅。冀滿斗筲之望。伏緣某昨聆座主侍郞主銓東洛。道路不通。且在襄州。行李極困。早欲發遣專使。切緣力未副心。今有諸兄弟裵璙遠將窮懇相告。輒具別狀。干瀆台階。下情無任戰灼之至。

I humbly consider that my person is entrusted to your gate of virtue, and that light has come to me in a strange land. Though the dragon of the pool has got its rain and has no fear of being buried at the end of the road, the sea swallow that holds mud in its mouth is guilty of spotting the painted beam. My footing is low, and so my fear is twice as keen. Your kindness is deep, and when can I hope to show any return? How should it be right for me to write out my lowly sincerity again and soil your honored virtue? But the matter is one I cannot help, and the feeling in it may perhaps be pitied. I do not shrink from the axe, and I hope you will fill this small measure of a wish. I heard some time ago that the examiner and vice minister, while presiding over the selections at Luoyang in the east, found the roads closed, and that he stays for the present in Xiangzhou, where his means for the journey are altogether spent. I wished early to send a messenger of my own, but my strength fell short of my heart. Now Pei Liao, one of his brothers, has come from far with a plea of hardship to tell me of it. So I have drawn up a separate letter, and trespass on your high steps. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its trembling and burning.