Yi Ok 李鈺 and His Iŏn 俚諺 (Folk Vernacular)

Yi Ok 李鈺 (1760–1815) was a prolific writer who lived in Hanyang (modern Seoul) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the massive pile of writings he left behind, his Iŏn 俚諺 (Folk Vernacular) best reveals his broad and multifaceted linguistic and literary knowledge, which in turn epitomizes the cultural complexity of late Chosŏn. In its three introductory treatises, as well as in the ensuing sixty-six pentasyllabic Sinitic quatrains written in female voices, Yi Ok illustrates why and how he writes poems about how “heaven and earth and the ten thousand things” (ch’ŏnji manmul 天地萬物) speak through him. This article combines a scholarly introduction to Yi Ok’s life and oeuvre with a philological translation of his Iŏn that unpacks the complexity of Yi Ok’s age to gain a fuller understanding of the last stage of Literary Sinitic (hanmun) literature in traditional Korea.