Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
A spring view from Mount Chanshan as I am about to return to Haedong將歸海東巉山春望
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.
1Who knows how to take a thousand pieces of gold and buy leisure?
目極煙波浩渺間。曉烏飛處認鄕關。旅愁從此休凋鬢。行色偏能助破顏。浪蹙沙頭花撲岸。雲妝石頂葉籠山。寄言來往鴟夷子。誰把千金解買閒。
I gaze to the end amid the misty waves, vast and far. Where the dawn crows fly, I make out the gate of my homeland. From this time my traveler's sorrow stops withering the hair at my temples. The look of the journey is best able to help my face break into a smile. The waves press at the sand's head, and flowers strike the bank. Clouds adorn the rock's crown, and leaves wrap the mountain. I send word to Chiyizi, who goes and comes: who knows how to take a thousand pieces of gold and buy leisure?
Interlinear notes 1
Chiyizi (鴟夷子) is Fan Li (范蠡), who aided the state of Yue and then withdrew, taking a boat and drifting about the Five Lakes (五湖). — translator