Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
On parting, left for a Daoist priestess留別女道士
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.
1When will the seawater ever dry away
每恨塵中厄宦塗。數年深喜識麻姑。臨行與爲眞心說。海水何時得盡枯。
Always I grieved that in the dust I was hemmed in on the road of office. For some years I was deeply glad to know Magu. Now as I go I speak to you with a true heart. When will the seawater ever dry away.