Venice masks

Monday 11 April 2011

May my love become an alder tree - Yi Chongbo

May my love become an alder tree
  of Kumsong in Hoeyang, and
  I an arrowroot vine in
  the third month or fourth:
Like a spider's web around a butterfly,
  the vine goes round the tree,
  tightly this way, tightly that,
  wrongly loosened, properly wound,
  bound, then loosened from down below
  all the way to the top,
  tighty winding round and round
  without a single gap, and
  unchanging, day and night,
  it's coiled around, twisting.
Though, in the heart of winter,
  we bear wind, rain, snow, and frost,
  could we ever be apart?

Yi Chongbo (1693-1766) - this peom is in the form sasol sijo. "Sijo is a generic term designating a three-line lyric song (translation uses six or more lines) whose tune was standardized in the eighteenth century so that it could be sung to a uniform musical setting. Dating from the fifteenth century, the sijo was the most popular, elastic , and mnemonic of Korean poetic forms. The sijo was sung and transmitted orally and was not written down until the early eighteenth century." - Peter H. Lee from the introduction to Sijo in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry.

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