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 · 3 passages · 130 Chinese characters · reading time 1.4 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 1 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.
Though one pray to Heaven and ask for a sage,
Heaven does not rain down a man of the Kong house;
and though one dig the earth and look for a worthy man,
the earth does not thrust up a Master Yan.
The bones of the sages and the worthies have rotted already,
and though one had the strength, one could not carry them back.
Why is it that the men of today
hold the eye cheap and prize the ear alone?
To no purpose the hairs sprout on the green histories,
and they take their own pleasure in the lees of the wine as a matter of course.
They do not know that among the scholars of the present age
there are vessels of the sages and the worthies as well.
When the men after us look back at today,
their looking up and longing will be just like this.
Interlinear notes 1
三首
Three poems.
吾觀萬物生。造化空自勤。徒生楚茨蔓。徒產荊棘繁。不使指佞草。延引榮其孫。遂令天下士。邪正久未分。
When I watch the ten thousand things come to birth,
creation is diligent of itself to no purpose.
To no purpose it brings forth the brambles and the vines,
and to no purpose it bears thick thickets of thorn trees.
But the grass that points out the flatterer
has not grown so as to make its offspring flourish.
And so in the end it has made the scholars of the realm
be long unable to tell the crooked from the straight.
大禹理洪水。未平人心險。睚眦生狂瀾。萬人平地墊。
Great U (大禹) brought the great waters under rule,
but the steepness of men's hearts was never leveled.
Out of a sidelong glance a mad wave rises,
and ten thousand men are drowned on level ground.