Kevin O'Rourke
Kyung Hee University

[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 8.2 (2005): 179-182. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]

Yang Hi Choe-Wall’s Vision of a Phoenix: The Poems of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn is a welcome addition to the scant store of scholarly books in English on traditional Korean literature. The few books that exist on the subject deal primarily with vernacular literature. Literature in hanmun (Chinese characters) has been largely neglected, hardly surprising, I suppose, in view of the dearth of good books on the subject even in Korean. The strength of Choe-Wall’s book is twofold: its presentation of the critical framework of traditional interpretation and the wealth of detail supplied in her commentary on the poems.

The book has four chapters:

Life of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn

The Sino-Korean Tradition of the Late Sixteenth Century

Nansŏrhŏn’s Writing

Traditional Sources

One expects the Life of Nansŏrhŏn chapter to be scant; all we know about her could be set out in half a page. In the event, Choe-Wall fills out the chapter with information on Nansŏrhŏn’s father, Hŏ Yŏp, her brothers, Hŏ Sŏng, Hŏ Pong and Hŏ Kyun, and on the family poetry tutor, Yi Tal. Because Yi Tal was a sŏŏl, that is, born of a yangban father and a kisaeng mother, the path to advancement in the bureaucracy was effectively blocked, a fate to which he seems to have resigned himself quite early in his life. Yi Tal was undoubtedly a good poet, but Hŏ Kyun’s evaluation, “His many splendid poems are acknowledged as being among the most brilliant collections of all the Tang style poetry written in Korea since the Silla dynasty” smacks of special pleading for a friend and family mentor who was, in effect, rejected by the Chosŏn ruling bureaucracy.

Chapter 2, in six sections, discusses various trends in hanmun literature in Chosŏn: the hun’gu and sarim schools, and a third school composed mostly of the disadvantaged (for the most part, the aforementioned sŏŏl), which Choe-Wall calls the literature of the outsiders. Only outlines are sketched. Choe-Wall moves quickly to what she terms the golden age of hansi, the period of the reintroduction of Tang poetics, featuring the work of the three so-called Tang poets of the Chosŏn dynasty, one of whom was Yi Tal. I am not sure that the characterization of the period as the golden age of hansi will stand up to scrutiny. Many hansi enthusiasts would opt for the poetry of Koryŏ—Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn, Yi Kyubo and Yi Chehyŏn among others quickly spring to mind—as the genre’s best. And in Chosŏn, Yi Saek. Kim Sisŭp, and Sŏ Kojong surely have claims to be regarded as outstanding poets. The pro-Tang impetus in the middle of the Chosŏn period was quickly followed by an anti-Tang movement, a new poetics that sought creativity and freedom rather than imitation of old masters as its ideological inspiration.

So much of the book is devoted to background material—Nansŏrhŏn’s life and writings, the hansi tradition in Chosŏn, and important textual considerations involving authenticity etc—that it seems justifiable to conclude that the book is directed primarily at scholars and serious students rather than at a popular audience. This is not to say that the popular reader will not enjoy it. The book has plenty of poems of quality that will be of interest to non-specialist poetry lovers. However, the scholarly emphasis that dominates the book makes the critical framework even more important since serious charges of plagiarism have been leveled against Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. The range of response to her work in traditional criticism goes from inspired poet to cheat. The plagiarism debate may not greatly influence the popular view of the quality of Nansŏrhŏn’s work, but it is an essential element for the serious student. Why Choe-Wall chooses to present much of this totally essential material in the final chapter of the book, almost as if it were an addendum, rather than in the front of the book where she deals with other textual issues, such as Hŏ Kyun’s compilation of his sister’s collected (selected) poems, remains a mystery.

It is unfortunate that Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn burned many (perhaps even most) of her poem manuscripts before she died. Choe-Wall seems to believe that she did this to preserve decorum, strongly influenced by the view that women writers were not supposed to publish their poems outside the family home. Anger and frustration, however, seem just as warranted as explanations of her action. At any rate, it remains unclear what written materials (poems, letters etc) Hŏ Kyun had at his disposal when he compiled his sister’s collection and hence to what extent he was forced to rely on his memory, which was purportedly phenomenal, to recall his sister’s poems. In critical terms this means that Hŏ Kyun’s text is a nest of worms, and the dating of the first publication of the poems in China becomes critical. The charges of plagiarism seem to be intimately bound up in Hŏ Kyun’s editorial work.

Choe-Wall lists the positive and negative sources, again most helpful for serious students of classical literature. The positive sources, which number six, are rather meagre; they occupy only a page and a half of printed text. This is because she introduces Hŏ Kyun’s epilogue to the collected poems and his critical assessment of his sister (Haksan ch’odam) in her account of the life of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. Yu Sŏngnyong’s epilogue is also introduced in this early chapter. Because so much of the positive material is introduced in an earlier chapter, the extract from Hogok sihwa by Nam Yongik, quoted from Hong Manjong’s Sihwa ch’ongnim, is left to carry most of the weight of the positive argument:

People sometimes say, when referring to Nansŏrhŏn’s poems that they are the work of Kyun himself, which he passed off under a false name to hoodwink the public. Her rhymes however are superior to those to which Hagok (Hŏ Pong) or (Hŏ) Kyun could aspire. At Oktang Hall, I once saw a book called Hsuan shih. Nansŏrhŏn’s collection was included at the end of the book. She could compete with all the immortals banished from Heaven (all the great poets of China).

The balance of the argument might have been better served by keeping all the positive material in one section.

The negative sources, which number eight, take up a much more substantial amount of text, some nine pages in all. Choe-Wall points out that of the negative sources, only one—she says source 6, but I think this is an error, she means source 7—shows substantive evidence of plagiarism. She distills this information down to ten lines of “complete plagiarism” and four lines of “combination.” I’m not sure this is a fair argument. The material in this negative source section covers a significant number of poems, and the evidence at face value seems rather damning. Choe-Wall rightly points out, however, that there is no evidence to implicate Nansŏrhŏn herself in any plagiarism; the plagiarism may have been perpetrated by her brother Hŏ Kyun. Choe-Wall also discusses the evidence on borrowed titles, which is not nearly so compelling since one can imagine dozens of Korean and Chinese poems with titles like Bamboo, Lotus, Lotus Pond etc.

All this is technical, critical material. In the public consciousness, Nansŏrhŏn’s poems are authentic. Indeed Choe-Wall makes a very valid point when she notes that Nansŏrhŏn’s existing poems should be accepted as authentic unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary. I believe she should have applied the same logic to Nansŏrhŏn’s kasa poems. “Kyuwŏn ka,” in particular, is such a representative poem that a Nansŏrhŏn volume that does not include it comes with a certain feeling of loss. Again in the popular consciousness the two kasa are inevitably part of the Nansŏrhŏn myth. Whether the opinions of two recent scholars are enough to exclude them, for me, at any rate, is rather problematical.

There are some lovely poems in the volume. “Autumn Plaint” is a good example, though the second line “Waking from a dream, I find silk bedspread unfulfilled.” is a bit awkward. I don’t know if you can use “unfulfilled” in this m anner, and the silk bedspread phrase screams for an article or pronoun. Interestingly the translator uses the more normal half empty instead of “unfulfilled” in the commentary. But overall the translation catches the loneliness and desolation of the woman speaker. And I suppose that on the basis of the poetic implications of unfulfilled for a lonely woman, you can make a case for the translation. Many of the translations catch the elusive nature of Nansŏrhŏn’s fine feelings. They are not all uniformly fluent, but the good ones more than make up for the awkward ones. Many academics make the case that awkwardness often highlights the differences in language and culture between English and the exotic languages of East Asia. I have heard this argument off and on for the last thirty years, but I have never found it persuasive, and I don’t think Choe-Wall would want to invoke it either. What is good here is far too good to hide behind the literal argument screen. Vision of a Phoenix: The Poems of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn marks a significant contribution to a neglected area of Korean studies in English.