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 · 95 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.
The sheer crag at its highest point would rub against the sky.
When the sea sun first opens, it is a single stalk of lotus.
Its form is so steep that it holds no common trees,
and its rank is so high that it draws only fine clouds and mist.
Cold shadows dotted like cream adorn the new snow,
and a clear sound like struck jade spurts from a slender spring.
Quietly I think that Penglai must be only like this,
and on a moonlit night the host of immortals surely gathers here.
Interlinear notes 1
中和甲辰年冬十月。奉使東泛。泊舟於大珠山下。凡所入目。命爲篇名。嘯月吟風。貯成十首。寄高員外。
In the tenth month of winter in the jiachen year of the Zhonghe era, I bore a commission and sailed east, and moored my boat below Mount Dazhu. Whatever came into my eyes I took for the title of a piece, and whistling at the moon and chanting in the wind I gathered ten poems and sent them to Vice Director Gao.