Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems

A poem laying my feelings before the Grand Commandant陳情上太尉詩

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 · 56 Chinese characters · reading time 0.2 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 20 — Poems 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.

1Within the seas, who pities a man from beyond the seas?

海內誰憐海外人。問津何處是通津。本求食祿非求利。只爲榮親不爲身。客路離愁江上雨。故園歸夢日邊春。濟川幸遇恩波廣。願濯凡纓十載塵。

Within the seas, who pities a man from beyond the seas? I ask for the ford, but where is the ford that leads through? From the first I sought to eat a salary, not to seek gain; it was only to bring honor to my parents, not for my own body. The parting sorrow of the traveler's road is rain upon the river; the dream of going back to my old garden is spring beside the sun. In crossing the river I have met by good fortune the wide waves of your kindness; I wish to wash from this common hat string the dust of ten years.