贈金川寺主
白雲溪畔刱仁祠
三十年來此住持
笑指門前一條路
纔離山下有千岐
– 崔致遠
Modern Korean Translation
증 금천사 주
흰 구름 시냇가에 절을 지으니
서른 해 내리 이 주지로세
웃으며 가리키노니 문앞의 한 줄기 길이
조금 곧 산 아래를 떠나면 천 가닥이 되네
– 최치원 (신라 시인)
English Translation
Presented to the Abbot of Keumcheon Temple
By the White Cloud Stream you built a temple
where for thirty years you’ve been the abbot.
Smiling, you point to the single trail outside the gate.
At the foot of the mountain, it branches out to a thousand paths.
– Choi Chiwon (Silla/Tang poet, 857 – 924?)
– English translation by Christina Han and Wing S. Chu
Note that the Chinese is the original language of composition – all poetry and literature in Silla-Era Korea was written in Classical Chinese (similar to the way poetry and literature in Europe during a parallel era was mostly written in Latin).
I found the poem in the book Solitary Cloud: Poetry of Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn, by Christina Han and Wing S. Chu. The text of the poem is only in the Chinese characters in the book, along with the English translation. I really wanted to include the Chinese text here, but I am incapable of typing Chinese characters unless I know their Korean pronunciation, and I only actually know about 20 such hanja, so… I wasn’t sure how to figure this out.
I tried a little trick, which was successful: I took a photo of the Chinese text with my phone, I went to one of those free OCR (Optical Character Recognition) websites and uploaded my photo, and presto, a somewhat faulty capture of the Chinese text. I took that text, in turn, and googled it, to find the correct text of the poem (verified against the book’s text), where I also found the modern Korean translation – for which there was no attribution.
[daily log: walking, 7km]