동짓달 기나긴 밤을 한 허리를 베어내어
봄바람 이불 아래 서리서리 넣었다가
정든 임 오신 날 밤이거든 굽이굽이 펴리라
I’ll cut a piece from the side
of this interminable winter night
and wind it in coils beneath these bedcovers, warm
and fragrant as the spring breeze,
coil by coil
to unwind it the night my lover returns.
(translation by Kevin O’Rourke)
This is a brilliant Sijo composed by Hwang Jin-i, a Kisaeng who lived in early 16th century (Joseon Period). Kisaeng refers to female entertainers who belonged to the Cheonmin (천민) class, or low-born people, who were at the bottom of the caste system and despised by deeply Confucian Korean society.
The speaker treats nighttime as some sort of fabric that can be cut, folded and put away so she can shorten the night she’s alone in the cold and lengthen the night she’ll be with her lover by unfolding it. She puts the piece of fabric away beneath spring breeze bedcovers so that the piece of nighttime, which is cold and sleepless, will also become “warm and fragrant” (which isn’t explicit in the original but implied by “spring wind”).
I looked at several other translations as well but felt that this one did the best job conveying the tone and message of the original Sijo. Some of the meanings are altered by a bit, though, when it translates “기나긴 (very long)” as “interminable” for example. However, I do think that a lonely, sleepless winter night, especially when there wasn’t enough heating, would have felt like forever for the speaker.
Transferring an interminable time from the cold midwinter night to the night with her lover would mean, as the translator puts it, an “eternal prolongation. . .of the delights of love.” There are many implied contrasts in this Sijo such as cold-warmth and loneliness-love, but according to O’Rourke, the pair “eternal-transitory is perhaps the key to the poem; their force derives from the conceit they express: Love is not eternal; it is definitely of this world”
this-duck.com 