Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
The Wildfire野燒
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.
1That jade and stone should burn together in one moment
望中旌旆忽繽紛。疑是橫行出塞軍。猛焰燎空欺落日。狂煙遮野截歸雲。莫嫌牛馬皆妨牧。須喜狐貍盡喪群。只恐風驅上山去。虛敎玉石一時焚。
In my gaze the banners are suddenly in wild disorder. I suspect it is an army sweeping out beyond the frontier. Fierce flames scorch the sky and make light of the setting sun. Wild smoke covers the fields and cuts off the homing clouds. Do not mind that the oxen and horses are all kept from grazing. Be glad rather that the foxes and wildcats have all lost their packs. My one fear is that the wind will drive it up the mountain, and let jade and stone burn together in one moment for nothing.