What might the music of the late Goryeo sing of? This Translation Tuesday, we are transported to more than half a millennia back, as Seenoo Kim translates two songs from the Middle Korean that reflect the vicissitudes of exterior and interior landscapes. Representing a tradition of folk poetry independent of the Chinese-influenced elite literature, these poems also reflect the literary possibilities of writing in the hangul script. In Kim’s translation, these meditative and often melancholic poems exude a lyricism that resonates with the contemporary ear.
Dong dong¹
The First Month²
The stream-waters
How lovingly they freeze and melt³
Yet I—born in the middle of the world
Walk all alone.
The Second Month
Under the full moon
Like the lanterns lit on high⁴
Your face is one
That shines on everyone.
The Third Month
All blossoming
Full spring’s rhododendrons⁵
You were born to be
The envy of others.
The Fourth Month
They didn’t forget the spring
The nightingales are coming back
Not my mister; whose fault is it
He’s forgotten the old me?
The Fifth Month
On the fifth day
The morning herbs of Dano day⁶
I’ll give them to you
So you can live for a thousand years.
The Sixth Month
Under the full moon
I’m like the combs abandoned on the cliffs⁷
Just for a while, I’ll follow my love
I know he’ll look back.
The Seventh Month
Under the full moon
I set up one hundred offerings⁸
Just to make the prayer
“May I walk in the same place as my love.”
The Eighth Month
The full moon
Means it’s Chuseok day⁹
But only with my love
Is it Chuseok day.
The Ninth Month
On the ninth day
The chrysanthemums we eat for healing¹⁰
Their fragrance drifts in.
The cottage is silent.
The Tenth Month
I’m like an olive tree chopped to pieces
Snapped and thrown away
Now no one wants to make it his.
The Eleventh Month
Lying on the dirt floor
Wearing a thin summer jacket
It’s such a sad thing
To have to send my love away.
The Twelfth Month
Carved out of ashwood
I’m like a pair of chopsticks on a tray
Arranged as a couple before my love
Then another man takes them away.
Green Hills
Might have lived—I might have lived
I might have lived amid the green hills,
Eating grapes, eating gooseberries,
I might have lived amid the green hills.
Cry, cry, o birds!
But get some sleep before you do.
My sorrows are sadder than yours,
But I sleep before crying, too.
Did you see the bird that was going?
The bird that was going underwater?
It was carrying a moss-pleated plow
The bird that was going underwater.
Doing this, doing that
I’ve managed to spend the day away
But what can I do for the night
With nobody to come nor go?
Where would they throw this stone at?
Who would they use this to hit?
I have no one to hate nor to love
But they hit me, so I cry as I go.
Might have lived—I might have lived
I might have lived by the seashore,
Eating seaweed, eating oysters,
I might have lived by the seashore.
I was going my way when I heard
Heading for the scullery when I heard
When I heard a deer play the fiddle
While standing on a wooden pole.
I went, and in a fat-bellied barrel
I brewed strong bubbling liquor;
The scent of the malt captured him
What am I supposed to do?
Notes
1 The poem is named after the semantically meaningless refrain of the song, 동동다리 dong dong dari. Middle Korean lyrics regularly contain large numbers of such nonsense vocables, which are imitative of the instruments that accompanied a musical performance of the poetry. dong dong stands for the beat of the drum, and dari for the melody of the flute. As the translations seek to present the works as literature rather than as music, the meaningless vocables have been excised from the text.
2 The first month of the traditional lunisolar calendar roughly corresponds to the Western month of February, the second month with March, and so on. The lunisolar months correspond to the lunar phases, so the fifteenth day of each month is always the full moon.
3 The speaker might be engaging in the Bridge-Treading Game (dapgyo nori), a custom of walking on top of bridges on the fifteenth day of the first month.
4 In medieval Korea, the fifteenth day of the second month was the day of the Lantern-Lighting Festival (yeondeunghoe), when people would hang lanterns to celebrate the brilliance of the Buddha’s teachings.
5 The rhododendrons allude to the spring festival of Samjitnal, held on the third day of the third month, when Koreans would hold picnics amid the newly blooming flowers and eat pancakes with rhododendron flowers in them.
6 During the festival of Dano on the fifth day of the fifth month, Koreans would eat mugwort cakes and other herbal foods as medicine.
7 On the fifteenth day of the sixth month, medieval Koreans would wash their hair in flowing water, comb their hair, and throw away the comb for good luck.
8 During the Ghost Festival, held on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, Buddhists present one hundred kinds of offerings and pray for deceased parents and ancestors.
9 Chuseok, a harvest festival held on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, is arguably the greatest Korean festival.
10 The Double Ninth Festival, held on the ninth day of the ninth month, is a day for chrysanthemum appreciation. Koreans would drink chrysanthemum liquor and eat pancakes with chrysanthemum flowers in them; this was thought to be medically beneficial.
Translated from the Middle Korean by Seenoo Kim
The Akjang gasa and the Akhak gwebeom are two manuals of late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Korean music. They include the lyrics to some two dozen anonymous songs, which appear to represent a medieval tradition of folk poetry independent of the Chinese-influenced elite literature. The genesis of the songs is conventionally dated to the late Goryeo (918–1392) period, although they could be put down to writing only after the invention of the Korean alphabet in 1443. The most famous of the songs, including the two translated here, discuss the travails of love from the perspective of unnamed women.
Seonoo Kim was born near Seoul, South Korea. He has studied Korean historical linguistics since 2019, and is currently attending the University of Cambridge.
*****
Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog: