Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
The Maple Tree紅葉樹
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.
1Even in the mountains you tell flourishing from withering
白雲巖畔立仙姝。一簇煙蘿倚畫圖。麗色也知於世有。閒情長得似君無。宿妝含露疑垂泣。醉態迎風欲待扶。吟對寒林却惆悵。山中猶自辨榮枯。
By the cliff of white clouds stands a fair immortal. A single cluster of misty vines leans in a painted picture. I know indeed that lovely color exists in the world, but no one has long held an idle heart like yours. Your old makeup holds the dew, as if you were shedding tears. Your drunken air meets the wind, as if waiting to be held up. I chant facing the cold grove, and instead I am downcast: even in the mountains you still tell flourishing from withering of yourself.