Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn

Biography

At the age of eight a girl from Gangneung composed “Inscription on the Ridge Pole of the White Jade Pavilion in the Kwanghan Palace”, a ceremonial text of the kind written when the main beam of a new building was raised. The piece was judged inspired, and its author was given the epithet “immortal maiden”. Her name was Hŏ Ch’ohŭi, sometimes Hŏ Okhye. Nansŏrhŏn, “Orchid and Snow Pavilion”, is the literary name under which she entered history.

She was born in 1563 in Gangneung, into a noble yangban family of the Yangcheon Hŏ clan. Her father, the scholar and official Hŏ Yŏp, had married as his second wife the daughter of a minister from the Gangneung Kim clan; from this marriage came her elder brother Hŏ Pong, Ch’ohŭi herself and her younger brother Hŏ Kyun, who would later be credited with “The Tale of Hong Gildong”. Who first took up her education is told in different ways. According to some accounts, her father himself taught his daughter writing, calligraphy and painting; according to others, he held strictly to the Confucian rule of “men above, women below”, and it was Hŏ Pong who noticed his sister’s talent and introduced her to the Confucian Five Classics and to Chinese letters. When the younger brother began studying poetry with Yi Tal, an expert in Tang poetry and a friend of Hŏ Pong, his sister studied with him, and the influence of Tang models is clearly visible in her early poems. Hŏ Pong was exiled to Kapsan for three years for his political views. Then Hŏ Kyun took charge of her education: it was also he who helped her correspond with men of letters, a circle she could not enter herself as a woman.

In 1577 she was married to Kim Sŏngnip, the son of a civil official. Little is known of her later life, and almost all of it comes from Hŏ Kyun. Scholars observe that her early poems are full of folklore and nature imagery in the Tang tradition, while the later ones speak of the bitter lot of married women, and they link this change to her marriage. The hypothesis seems plausible to me, but there is nothing to test it against: the “Tang” poems also mention events that took place after the wedding.

She died on 19 March 1589 in Hansŏng, present-day Seoul, at the age of twenty-seven by Korean reckoning, less than a year after the death of Hŏ Pong. Before her death she asked for her manuscripts to be burned. Hŏ Kyun saved what he had managed to copy and remember.

After that her poems lived on without her. Hŏ Kyun gave some of them to the Ming poet Zhu Zhifan, and in 1608 the collection “Nansŏrhŏn chip” was published in China, where it met with great acclaim. In 1711 the Japanese publisher Bundaiya Jirō brought out her poems in Japan. In 1612 another book appeared in China, “Chwisawonchang”: 168 poems and a single prose text, the very “Inscription” she had written at eight. The book was thought lost until, in September 2000, it was found in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. The Korean collection compiled by Hŏ Kyŏngnan in 1913 contains 211 poems in various Chinese forms: old-style verse, regulated verse, quatrains and a single piece of rhymed prose. More than half of her surviving poems are devoted to immortals and celestial beings. “Song of Autumn Night” shows her early, image-rich manner; “Song for the Poor Girl” sympathises with a seamstress who sews fine clothes she will never own; “Woman’s Grievance” already sounds like her late lyric poetry. Two kasa songs in hangul, “Song of a Woman’s Complaint” and “Song of Coloring Nails with Touch-me-not Balsam”, are also printed under her name, but their authorship is disputed: the main argument in her favour, the similarity of their titles to her verified poems in Classical Chinese, has been partly refuted by recent research.

She is also called a painter. The pictures “Anggan bigeumdo”, “Mukjodo” and “Peonies” are known under her name; she painted landscapes, light ink works with touches of colour, and orchids.

Her grave is in Gwangju, in Gyeonggi Province. In 1985 it was moved some five hundred metres, and on 7 May 1986 it was declared a provincial monument. The inscription on the gravestone was composed by Yi Sungnyŏng, and in 1985 a stone bearing one of her poems was set up beside it.