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

On reaching Shanyang I again received cloth sent by the Grand Commandant, to serve as a token for my homecoming visit and for lengthening my parents' years, and I respectfully thank him with a poem行次山陽。續蒙太尉寄賜衣段。令充歸覲續壽信物。謹以詩謝

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.

1Not the glory of my house alone, but the glory of the state

自古雖誇晝錦行。長卿翁子占虛名。旣傳國信兼家信。不獨家榮亦國榮。萬里始成歸去計。一心先算却來程。望中遙想深恩處。三朶仙山目畔橫。

From of old men have boasted of walking in brocade by day, yet Sima Xiangru and Zhu Maichen held an empty name and no more. I carry the tidings of the state and the tidings of my house together, so it is not the glory of my house alone, but the glory of the state. After ten thousand li my plan to go home is made at last, and with one heart I first reckon the road of my return. As I gaze, I think far off of the place of deep kindness, where three clusters of immortal hills lie across the edge of my sight.