Kim Jeong-hui: The Complete Poems — Volume 10 Introduction: From Seoul to Jeju

This introduction to Volume 10 of the complete English translation of Kim Jeong-hui’s poems from the Wandang Jeonjip covers the volume’s structure, the Jeju exile period, how exile poems are identified, and what distinguishes Volume 10’s literary character from Volume 9.

Volume 10 of the Wandang Jeonjip contains 221 poem entries — significantly more than Volume 9’s 152 — and spans a longer and more varied stretch of Kim Jeong-hui’s life. Where Volume 9 gathered poems from Kim’s active years of social literary life: the 1809 Beijing visit that brought him into contact with Weng Fanggang (翁方綱, styled Tanxi / 覃溪) and the Qing scholarly world, the decades of gatherings at Seongnyou Tower and the mountains around Seoul, the literary friendships that produced the Jingling School sequence and the sixteen panels for Oh Nanseol — Volume 10 encompasses all of that’s continuation, then its rupture, then the long silence and noise of eight years on a southern island, and finally some trace of what came after.

The volume opens with twenty poems forming a topographic sequence — scenic inscriptions at a single natural site, moving from Hambyeon Tower (涵碧樓) through caves, walls, peaks, pools, and rocky formations to a water-and-cloud pavilion. This kind of extended natural inventory, in which each geological feature receives its own poem, is characteristic of the Korean literary excursion tradition. What follows these twenty poems is a body of occasional verse — social, occasional, playful — that continues the pre-exile mode of Volume 9. Weng Fanggang is still invoked; Cho-ui (草衣) is still present; the ten farewell poems for Shin Wi (申緯, styled Jaha / 紫霞) going to Beijing (poem 53) is the volume’s most substantial pre-exile set piece, with a preface and elaborate annotations about the Su Studio (蘇齋 — Weng Fanggang’s study, on first appearance in this volume: named for his devotion to Su Dongpo, the center of Kim’s Beijing literary world).

The exile poems begin at poem 100: 瀛洲禾北鎭途中 (On the Road Through Hwabukjin, Jeju Island). From that poem forward, a different landscape and a different social world enter the verse.

In the autumn of 1840, Kim Jeong-hui was implicated in a factional dispute — the aftermath of the Yunsangdo (윤상도 / 尹尙度) case — and sentenced to political exile. He was fifty-five years old. His destination was Daejeong County (大靜縣 / 대정현) on the southern coast of Jeju Island (濟州島 / 제주도), the remote island off Korea’s southern tip then known by its classical Chinese name 瀛洲 (Yeongju) and its ancient Korean name 乇羅 (Tamra) or 耽羅 (Tamna). He remained there for eight years, until 1848.

Daejeong County was, by the standards of nineteenth-century Joseon exile destinations, one of the most remote possible assignments: an island separated from the mainland by open sea, far from any significant urban center, inhabited by fishing and farming communities unfamiliar with the scholarly culture Kim had spent his life inside. The distance was not merely geographical. The narcissus (水仙花 / 수선화) grew on Jeju in such profusion that islanders treated it as a weed, plowing it up without recognizing it — a detail Kim notes with astonishment in poem 132. The flower that Chinese scholars celebrated in ink and verse was, here, a common nuisance. This kind of dislocation — between Kim’s accumulated cultural world and the island’s genuine indifference to it — runs through the exile poems as a recurring condition rather than a complaint.

What Kim found in Daejeong, alongside the dislocation, was a new intimacy with a completely different community: island youth (島童 / 도동) who came to learn from him, local farmers and fisherfolk, monks who passed through or stayed, and a handful of literary correspondents who maintained the connection to the mainland. Within the island, the Buddhist community matters: Honheo (混虛 / 혼허), the monk who appears in Volume 9’s poems 93, 137, and 150, becomes a significant presence in Volume 10 as well. From the mainland, Yi Sang-jeok (李尙迪 / 이상적, 1804–1865, on first appearance in this volume: Kim’s most devoted disciple, who continued sending books from Beijing during the exile and to whom Kim gave the famous ink-plum painting Sehan-do / 歲寒圖) and Heo Ryeon (許鍊 / 허련, 1808–1893, art name Soochi / 小癡, on first appearance: the artist-disciple who traveled to Jeju to study under Kim during the exile years) represent the threads of continuity. When Soochi arrives on the island, the poems shift register: the teacher-student relationship produces a different quality of occasion than the pre-exile peer exchanges.

Within Volume 10, exile poems are identifiable through specific markers. Any poem containing one or more of the following carries the Jeju exile period designation (1840–1848):

瀛洲 (Yeongju) — the classical Chinese name for Jeju Island, from Daoist mythology (one of the three immortal islands of the eastern sea).

大靜 (Daejeong) — the county on Jeju’s southern coast where Kim was confined.

島童 (Islandyouth / 도동) — the young islanders Kim taught and wrote for.

逐臣 (Banished official) — Kim’s self-designation as an official under political exile.

乇羅 / 耽羅 (Tamra / Tamna) — the ancient name for Jeju and its former kingdom.

小癡 (Soochi) — Heo Ryeon’s art name, whose presence indicates the island period.

Volume 10’s structure in this translation series reflects the exile chronology: Parts 1 through 5 (poems 1–93) are pre-exile; Part 6 (poems 94–112) is where the exile core begins, with 瀛洲禾北鎭途中 (poem 100) and 大靜村舍 (poem 101) appearing in immediate succession. Parts 7 and 8 (poems 113–150) contain the exile’s most sustained poetic sequences, including the narcissus cluster and the thirteen 小遊仙詞. Parts 9 through 12 (poems 151–221) carry poems of uncertain or transitional dating, many without explicit exile markers but bearing the tone and setting of the later exile or the first post-exile years.

Poems without explicit exile markers in Volume 10 are assigned the designation: Period uncertain; likely exile or post-exile (1840–1856).

Volume 10 operates in two registers that are related but distinct. The pre-exile poems continue the mode of Volume 9: social, allusive, engaged with the Beijing scholarly world through memory and letter, attentive to painting and calligraphy, written for specific occasions in a circle of literary peers. Poem 53 (ten farewell poems to Shin Wi going to Beijing) belongs to this register — the most elaborate pre-exile set piece in Volume 10, replete with annotations about the Su Studio and Weng Fanggang’s rubbing collection.

The exile poems shift the register without abandoning the formal vocabulary. The heptasyllabic regulated verse and pentasyllabic quatrain remain the dominant forms, but they now carry island landscapes: subtropical vegetation (映山紅 / azalea, 木槿 / rose of Sharon, 南瓜 / gourd), the sounds of farming and fishing, the rhythms of a community that knows nothing of the Jingling School or the Lanting Gathering. The allusions do not disappear — Su Dongpo, Du Fu, Chan references, epigraphic analogies — but they arrive in a context where no one around Kim can share their weight. This condition of cultural solitude is not lamented in most of the exile poems; it is quietly present in the gap between what the poem knows and what the landscape knows.

The narcissus becomes the exile’s central figure precisely because it embodies this gap. The flower that Chinese scholars used as a figure for refined seclusion grows on Jeju in such abundance that it has no cultural significance to the islanders — it is not rare, not cultivated, not prized. Kim’s narcissus poems (130–133) work through this paradox: the flower of reclusion growing in involuntary profusion around the involuntary recluse.

The thirteen 小遊仙詞 (poem 134) are formally unusual in Kim’s corpus: the ci (詞) lyric form — traditionally the vehicle of entertainment-register poetry, associated with song, feminine voice, and a lightness foreign to the weighty didactic mode of Kim’s critical prose — appears here in a “small” (小) register, playful and self-aware. They are called 小 not as a standard modesty marker but as a genuine tonal signal: these are poems content to be small, unserious, wandering.

Among the pre-exile poems, one entry deserves special attention for the retrospective light it casts across the volume. Poem 30 is 別乇羅伯之任 四首 — four poems of farewell to the governor of Tamna (乇羅 = Jeju), written before the exile when Kim was sending someone else to the island. The source annotations to this poem are Kim’s most detailed scholarly treatment of Jeju’s history before he lived there: the Tamna kingdom’s “Star Master” (星主) ruler title, the ancient Chinese name 聃牟羅, the correspondence with Sui Shu and Korean records. Kim writes about Jeju as a scholar examining an interesting case, not as someone whose life will be defined by it.

That four-poem farewell — learned, engaged, essentially curious — sits in the volume’s second installment (Part 2, poems 19–36). By the sixth installment (Part 6), the same island receives its first poems written from within: On the Road Through Hwabukjin, Jeju Island. The distance between those two perspectives is Volume 10’s organizing tension.

Readers arriving from Volume 9 will find many of the same figures in Volume 10, though their roles shift under the changed circumstances. Cho Hui-ryong (조희룡 / 趙熙龍, pen name Yijae / 彝齋) continues to appear, as does Cho-ui (草衣), now more monk than tea-companion. The Beijing circle — Weng Fanggang invoked through memory, Ruan Yuan (阮元, styled Yuntai / 芸臺) recalled — gradually recedes as the exile deepens. New figures take their place: the island youth (島童), the monk Honheo (混虛), and eventually Soochi (小癡 / Heo Ryeon), whose arrival on Jeju marks one of the volume’s emotional high points.

The twelve installments of Volume 10 move through the volume’s 221 entries in sequence. The pre-exile material (Parts 1–5) has its own integrity as a continuation of Volume 9’s world; the exile core (Parts 6–8) is the volume’s most intense and distinctive section; and the later installments (Parts 9–12) carry the complex territory of late exile and return. Each installment’s introduction describes the specific character of the poems it covers. For readers tracing the full exile arc, the progression from poem 30 (farewell to Jeju’s governor, written in freedom) to poem 100 (arriving as exile) to the narcissus cluster (130–133) to the 小遊仙詞 (134) and beyond constitutes the volume’s narrative spine. The individual poems, taken in order, constitute its substance.