Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) 東國李相國集 · Yi Gyubo · Compiled 1241 (Goryeo, 28th year of King Gojong); revised and enlarged 1251 · 1 passages · 120 Chinese characters · reading time 1 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection — Chronology The collected writings of Yi Gyubo of Goryeo, gathered and cut in woodblock by his son Yi Ham in 1241 and revised and enlarged by his grandson Yi Ikbae in 1251. It holds poems and rhapsodies, memorials and reports sent up to the king, records written for temples and pagodas, stele and tomb inscriptions, letters and prefaces, and the state letters that passed to and from the Mongols during the invasions. The Lay of King Dongmyeong, which sings the founder of Goguryeo, stands in volume 3 of the first collection, and the daily life of a man who called himself the White Cloud Layman — with his wine, his zither and his verse — fills the later collection. The book closes with the last poem he wrote as his eyes failed and he laid down the brush, and with the dirge and tomb inscription others made for him after his death.
His heir Ham (涵), having bound up his father's collection, both the former and the latter, went on to make a chronological record as well, following the family notes the Duke had set down in his own hand. When I look at the chronological records attached to the collections of the ancients, each of them sets out in full and in detail the beginning and the end of what was written in every year, and the threads of it, so that the pieces may be compared one with another. Yet on the whole the year and the month in which a thing was made cannot all have been written down in the poetry collections of the ancients; and on what they leaned to put it in with such detail I do not know.
Now in my father's collection too there is much for which the year and the month were not set down. Therefore I could not go through them year by year and set each one in its place, and have left only one or two in ten. Yet of the Duke's composing, how could there have been a single year, or a single month, that was without it?