ABSTRACT
Cho Kyuik begins his study of the kagok-ch’angsa (literally kagoksong-lyric, his preferred term for the genre more commonly called shijo) by pointing out that Korea has two poetry traditions: the hanshi tradition (poems in Chinese following the rules of Chinese prosody), which is a poetry to be read and contemplated; and the vernacular tradition (hyangga, Koryo kayo, kasa and what today we call shijo), which is a poetry to be sung and heard. The common denominator across the vernacular songs, he tells us, is the kasa, literally music words. K a s a includes under its umbrella all vernacular songs. The songs we call shijo today – shijo as a term referring to a literary text is a twentieth century coinage - are a subdivision of kasa. Originally sung to the kagok-ch’ang, the accompaniment was complex, featuring five sung sections and two musical interludes, and requiring the services of a considerable ensemble. The shijo-ch’ang, a much simpler musical accompaniment, featuring three sung sections, whose rhythms could be beaten out on a drum or, if needs be, on the thigh of the singer, was not developed until the middle of the 19th century. Scholars are not sure exactly when.1 The songs we call kasa today, are a specific genre that developed either at the end of Koryo or at the beginning of Choson. Scholars hardly agree on anything about the genre except that it is a four-umbo (breath-group) structure. They are not even agreed on whether it is prose or poetry. Some see kasa primarily as prose or as an essay in verse-song form; others see kasa as song; still others divide the genre into kasa song and kasa essay; Cho Tongil posits a new genre, neither drama,
lyric, nor epic, a genre whose primary focus is didactic.2 Since Chinese was the language of literature throughout the
Choson dynasty, Chong Ch’ol’s primary literary vehicle was hanshi. He is credited with 763 hanshi and four p u (odes in Chinese characters). However, like many prominent poet-officials at the time, he also liked to compose in the vernacular. He is credited with four or five kasa, depending on whether “Changjinjusa” (An Invitation to Imbibe) is treated as a kasa or as a sasol shijo; and some 107 shijo, of which seventeen are of very doubtful ascription, and others more or less doubtful, leaving about eighty or ninety that are accepted by the commentators. These vernacular poems are collected in Songgang kasa (Pine River was Chong Ch’ol’s penname). A Shijo Poet in the Court of King Sonjo is a translation of Songgang kasa.
