[New Book] The Collected Poems of Jeong Chobu

[Financial News] Waterbirds take flight at the sound of oars, and at dusk the mountain hues spread across the water. This is the scene captured in “Setting a Boat Afloat on Dongho” by Jeong Chobu, an 18th-century Joseon woodcutter and poet. The Collected Poems of Jeong Chobu is the first book to bring together all 106 of his classical Chinese poems, which had been passed down separately.
Ahn Daehoe, a distinguished professor at Sungkyunkwan University, discovered Chobu Yugo at Korea University’s Central Library in 2011. Over the following decade or so, he examined seven poetry collections and some 40 documents. He compared the original texts of poems found in various sources and translated them into Korean.
A poem asking for his rice debts to be forgiven reveals the difficult circumstances of Jeong Chobu’s household, which made ends meet by selling firewood. The book also includes a record from Chomok Pilji, a textbook from Korea’s Enlightenment period, and a Korean translation published in the magazine Sinchwimi. These two sources show how Jeong Chobu’s poems were passed down to later generations.
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