Five Poems

I was first introduced to the work of Choe Chi-won as a graduate student by Spencer Lee-Lenfield, a scholar, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature, and a fellow contributor to Asymptote. Spencer’s abiding research interest has been the dynamics and interactions between Korean and English literature, as well as the fecund ways that those schooled in multiple literary traditions produced works of translation in the twentieth century. At the time, I was looking for Classical Chinese poetry that had not been translated much into English as part of a final assignment for a class on literary Chinese. Spencer kindly shared some of his own past translation work on Choe and I felt an immediate sense of kinship with Choe’s work.

Given my Malaysian Chinese and Korean heritage, as well as my upbringing in multiple countries, I felt a particular closeness with the feelings of alienation Choe described experiencing while studying for the imperial exams in Tang China as a foreigner. Such feelings accompanied me through academic sojourns in the United Kingdom and the United States. I have also sometimes felt an alienation from the English in which I write my own poems. It is often assumed that most Tang and Song poetry of repute was composed by ethnically Chinese writers, but Choe’s impressive oeuvre is testament to the depth of his feeling and the precision of his craft.

Choe is often anthologised in collections of Tang and Song poetry such as the Complete Tang Poems (全唐诗补逸) and is one of few foreigners to receive this honour. His most noted work is Gyewonpilgyeong (桂苑筆耕 Ploughing the Laurel Grove with a Wiring Brush). Choe’s return to Korea after his service in the Tang court allowed him to devote his energies to the propagation of Confucian teaching. He earned recognition as a progenitor of Korean literature thereafter.

Where translation is concerned, what proved most difficult was the lack of extant translations of Choe’s work into English. Unlike poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, or Li Qingzhao, for whom there exists a corpus of translations, Choe’s work has not attracted much attention. Relying on classical Chinese dictionaries and my own intuition did not always help to rectify difficulties in translation. For example, in the poem “Being at ease in Late Spring, to my friend Gu Yun,” I had wrestled with whether “Gu Yun” referred to the name of a friend, was a reference to Choe himself, was a reference to another literary form, or was an allusion. I later found confirmation that, in other translations of the poem, Gu Yun was a close friend of Choe’s and a fellow scholar-official. In the poem “Imgyǒng Terrace by Hwangsan River,” had it not been for glosses by previous translators, I might not have realized Choe was describing places in Silla.

While the initial translations I’d prepared preserved the semantic accuracy of the poems, it nevertheless felt that there was some distance between them and myself. Spencer encouraged me to find ways to place a bit more of myself as a translator in the midst of the poems. This led to experimentations with style, with form, and with the rendering of the poems. I took inspiration from such translators as Tse Hao Guang, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, and Wong May, particularly for “Imgyǒng Terrace by Hwangsan River.” “By Inspiration”, a didactic poem, ended up being informed by the poetry of Wendell Berry. “pomegranates,” perhaps the most contemporary in its treatment of the source material, was inspired by the poems of Li-Young Lee.

I am indebted to the previous translation and critical work undertaken by Christina Han, Wing S. Chu, and Key S. Ryang, as well as by Spencer. I am also grateful to Dr. Pauline Lin, whose guidance proved invaluable as I worked through each poem and who was indomitably encouraging throughout the process of translating these poems.