Books: Sijo

THE EVER WHITE MOUNTAIN translated and edited by Inez Kong Pai. 175 pages. Tuttle. $4.95.

Korea in 1392, as in 1965, was a nation violently divided. The Koryo dynasty was challenged by the House of Yi, and civil war was in the air. At this dangerous juncture Jong Mong-ju, a minister loyal to the old dynasty, paid a courtesy call on King Taejo, the father of Yi Bang-won, the leading strategist of the opposition. His host’s son, in salutation, took up a harp and sang this sinister and seditious ditty:

What difference does it make,

this way or that?

The tangled vines of Mansu San

in profusion grow entwined.

We too could be like that,

and live together a hundred years.

In a cold fury, Jong Mong-ju extemporized this celebrated reply:

Though this body die and die,

though it die a hundred times; Though these bones bleach and pulverize to dust; whether my soul will be or will

not be—This heart was pledged to my lord:

how could it ever change?

It never did. On the way home, Jong Mong-ju was ambushed and assassinated by the men of Yi.

Poetry in medieval Korea was an aristocratic art that was practiced principally in an aristocratic form: sijo. The word means “time rhythm,” and it describes a flexible tercet that has the form of a syllogism and the force of a heroic haiku. Yi Bang-won and Jong Mong-ju addressed each other in sijo, and over the next five centuries their example was emulated by thousands of eminent statesmen, generals and courtesans. A vast literature of sijo resulted, and even these stiff translations by Inez Kong Pai suggest that it is a poetic form whose recognition by the West is long overdue.

The Golden Age of sijo, says Translator Pai, began in 1456 and lasted for 150 years. Created by courtiers, many of these poems conceal political metaphors, but more and more often a personal note is sounded. Yi Sun-sin, the brilliant admiral who invented the ironclad and routed the Japanese fleet in 1592, described the loneliness of leadership:

On this moonlit night on Han San isle,

I sit alone in this fortressed tower.

With my great sword at my side, deep melancholy overwhelms.

From somewhere the shrill sound of

a flute

tears me inside out.

And Hwang Jini, the most celebrated courtesan of 16th century Korea, composed dozens of exquisite love songs in sijo.

Alas! It was my doing;

how did I know I would miss him so?

Had I asked him to stay,

he would not have gone.

Of all things! To yearn for a love

after sending it away.

I cannot comprehend this kind of love.

The Age of the Bards began in the 18th century, and before long, these professional singers had assembled enormous anthologies of sijo. In one of them occurs a macabre little lyric by Yi Jong-bo that reads like one of Rimbaud’s more lurid Illuminations.

Pear blossoms shaken by mad winds—hither and thither they’re tossed; Unable to cling to their bough,

they’re caught in the spider’s web.

The spider leaps—expecting a feast of butterflies.

Sijo are still written in Korea and, as might be expected in such troublous times, their burden once more is often political. This one, not included in The Ever White Mountain, was written in 1954, at the end of the Korean War, by Yi Un-sang, the foremost living sijo poet.

Stumbling, fragmented,

only one shred of entrails left, Grasping it, hugging it,

there is a people who must go on. I want to see the smile of dawn again, bloody though its face may be.