The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo

by Richard Rutt (Editor)

The sijo is the most popular and most Korean of all traditional Korean poetic forms, originating with the old songs of the Hyangka of the Sylla Empire (668-936) and the prose songs of the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392). Sometimes likened to haiku for its brevity, a typical sijo poem follows a three-line pattern, with each line containing approximately fifteen syllables. The first two lines mimic one another both in form and content, but the last line often introduces a twist or countertheme, not only bringing the poem to a close, but sharpening the theme developed in the first two lines.
The popularity of the sijo in Korea--writers range from royalty to common citizens--is always a challenge for the translator, who must often inhabit widely differing backgrounds to completely understand a poem's subtle nuances. Richard Rutt's translations, considered to be some of the best available in English, remain true to the unique structure of the original Korean lyric.
The Bamboo Grove will interest not only poets and students of poetry, but scholars of Korean culture curious to view history through this important and significant form of verse.
The white snow has left the valleys where the clouds are lowering,
Is it true that somewhere the plum trees have happily blossomed?
I stand here alone in the dusk and do not know where to go.
YI SAEK (1328-1396)
Richard Rutt is also the editor and translator of the book Virtuous Three Classic Korean Novels and, most recently, The Zhou A New Translation with Commentary of the Book of Changes . David R. McCann is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.

Genres: Poetry

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Cecil Richard Rutt CBE, was an English Roman Catholic priest and a former Anglican bishop.

Rutt spent almost 20 years of his life serving as an Anglican missionary in South Korea, a country for which he developed a deep affection. He was perhaps the last of the line of scholar-missionaries, beginning with James Scarth Gale, Homer B. Hulbert, George Heber Jones and the Anglican bishop Mark Napier Trollope who laid the foundations of what is now known as Korean studies. Some years after he retired as an Anglican bishop, Rutt was one of several Anglicans received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1994. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest the following year and spent the closing years of his life in Cornwall.

Reviews

[Elizabeth Jorgensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The must-read for all things sijo!

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nine houses out of every ten
Have their doors nailed up.
But in the hearts of men
There are more and bigger nails.
I find myself turning over in my mind
All those nailed-up things.

Ch’oe Namson (1886-1957), on returning to Seoul in Feb 1951 after expulsion of the communist army.

This is an excellent collection of poetry, an education in the verse form and a fine translation. I snagged it as a discard in the library book shop, on the basis of Steve’s reviews of other Korean poetry, and have been well rewarded. This is the kind of collection you put beside your bed to turn to again and again.

Sijo is a short form that goes back to the 1400s. Sijo is actually the term for the songs that employ the poems as lyrics. The meter is set by a drum beat. One sijo tradition is an art form with professional performers, originally the property of the upper class. Later, folk song themes were adapted to the sijo form as well. The melodies were strong and the rhythms simple. Their style underlies the pop songs and the military marches that are blared forth on loudspeakers in Korean city streets today. The sinuous melodies of the sijo belonged to a more aristocratic tradition…

In a very interesting section Rutt traces sijo development to historical events such as the Yi dynasty inhibiting culture in northern Korea, devastation from Manchu and Japanese invasions, and the invention of the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century. (The Chinese alphabet had been employed to approximate Korean before that.)

A sijo is composed of three lines, each with a major pause in the middle. Each line has four phrases, usually with 3 to 5 syllables each. There is more involved in the weight and rhythm of the poem in Korean than I can explain here; Rutt likens it to the ‘sprung rhythm’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rutt has tried to match the syllable counts, where reasonable. There is much punning, alliteration, and assonance in sijo, but Rutt says he didn’t force this at the cost of sense and flow in his versions. (He explains the punning in the original in notes in some cases.) He has followed the form of first line setting out the idea, second line developing it, and the third line throwing in a twist or slight change of direction.

Rutt includes a word-for-word translation of one poem. It reveals the same sort of telegraph language as in a Chinese poem: Man himself not climbing, mountains high does he say? (the last line of the three). Rutt’s versions become poetry in English while respecting the spare directness of the Korean, as shown in the examples below.

The book starts with a serious but not pedantic overview of the history and prosody of sijo. Then comes the largest section, the traditional sijo, divided by theme. These include, Historical, Political, Moral, Loyalty, Love, Solitude, Music, Mortality, Nature, and Rusticity. These are followed by a more informal, later kind of sijo that exhibits variations on the form (sasol sijo), modern sijo, and notes on the Korean sources.

The songs are sometimes modeled on, or quote, Chinese poetry. Rutt likens this to Augustan poetry with its Latinate vocabulary. Other sijo use the more direct Korean as we would Anglo-Saxon. Rutt says he chose to take a faithful approach to the rugged Korean, and to maintain it’s colloquial tone. The Koreans also drew on Chinese history and mythology in their sijo.

To show the range of themes and styles, I’ve typed out a poem from three different sections. In selecting them, unfortunately, I realized that the beauty emerges from reading many poems and entering into the headspace of the culture; extracted they lose a little.

Rutt says that Yun Sŏndo can be considered the best sijo poet. His cycle on fishing during the four seasons is the highlight of this book. Each season has ten sijo, with the usual sijo form altered by the inclusion of refrains that continue fishing trip actions and rowing rhythm from poem to poem. Here is one from Autumn, which I thought the best sequence:

Frost congeals on my clothes
And yet I do not feel the cold.
--Take down the sail, take down the sail!--
An angler’s boat is narrow,
But the world at large is narrower.
--Chigukch’ong, chiguksh’ong, Oshwa!--
Tomorrow I’ll work like this,
And again the day after that.

And by an anonymous author, in the section ‘Songs of Retirement and Rustic Life’:

I doze and wake, take my fishing rod,
dance a little and forget my rain-cape
Do not laugh, white seagulls,
At the antics of an old man.
Ten li on, the peaches are in bloom,
and the spring fever is on me.

From the modern sijo, by Sin Ch’aeho :

Do not praise the Diamond Mountains,
Their glory is but crimson maples.
Red foliage can boast nothing
But colors dying, leaf by leaf.
Go instead and look for happiness
In the great winds of the Mongol Desert.

Rutt was an Anglican bishop (later Roman Catholic priest) who clearly was a sensitive observer of Korea and an admiring student of its language and culture. (He also was a scholar of Chinese.) He gave his second country a fine gift by enabling other English-speaking readers to enjoy its songs.

[Cheryl]

Couldn't finish before it came due. Must try again. So far I've particularly enjoyed the few "Songs of Mortality" included. I'll be skipping the Historical and Political Songs. The intros were somewhat interesting and would be much more so to a scholar or anyone with particular connections. Worth using ILL for.

[Yune · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost always find reading translations a slightly sad affair; poetry in particular, where the choice of a single word can matter so much. And when there's a specific form to observe, that's yet another limitation that inevitably transforms the content in favor of the structure. That said, Rutt says in his introduction:

There is a temptation sometimes to translate prettily, echoing, perhaps, the prettiness of countless translations of Japanese verse into English. The result would be loss of the ruggedness which is often characteristic of Korean poems, and the substitution of the delicate vapidity which came to the sijo only in the period of its nineteenth-century decline. I have tried not to tamper with the images, except when too plain a translation might have given a wrong impression.

If the "faithful" approach sometimes makes the translation seem flat and prosy, I have happily taken the risk, because the sijo is often colloquial in tone.

His choice, obviously. And I will say that I partially sought out this book because I was upended by one particular translated poem by Hwang Chini beginning thusly:

I will break in two the long strong back
        of this long midwinter night,
Roll it up and put it away
        under the springtime coverlet...

Not all of the poems held real resonance for me, although often enough an image or sentiment arrested my attention. I did appreciate the deliberate pace of them en masse, however, as well as an escape from the usual Western themes. Poems are collected in chapters such as:

Historical Songs
Political Songs
Moral Songs
Songs of Loyalty
Love Songs (inevitable in any culture, I suppose)
Songs of Solitude
Songs of Music
Songs of Mortality
Songs of Nature
Songs of Retirement and Rustic Life

Also deeply appreciated were the notes which accompanied many of the poems, which provided useful context about the poet or their subject matter. "A distinguished...scholar-official [who] remained loyal to the Koryo Dynasty during the stormy period in which it succumbed to the rising Yi family. The surname Yi means 'plum tree'" illuminated and completely changed the meaning of a poem about uncertainty and plum trees blossoming.

A worthwhile introduction to sijo if you're interested in Korean poetry; I don't know how much appeal it would have to general English-language poetry lovers, though.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never read any Korean poetry before this book, and I am so glad that I came across this! Sijo is a centuries-old form of poetry that resonates with a modern feeling even while it evokes images of eleventh century warriors standing, sword in hand, on snow-capped mountains lit by the moon. The poetry is gorgeous, spare, simple, elegant, and rich in imagery. It opened up a whole new area of learning for me. The book says that Sijo is sung - not recited. I'd really love to hear the melodies that accompany these poems someday, ideally while on a trip to Korea -sitting near a fish pond in a garden listening to elders singing sijo, just as the author of this book did.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sijo is the Korean relative of the Japanese haiku and tanka form. Structurally, it reminds one of a "sonnet in miniature," due to the "turns" the form requires.

Rutt's anthology is excellent. It is the one invaluable source on Sijo that's available in the English language.