Written in Jest After a Day Without Drinking一日不飮戱作
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 · 98 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 3 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.
Have you not seen how Zhou, the Grand Master of Ceremonies (太常), in the old days
kept the fast and stayed clear three hundred and fifty-nine days of the year?
And have you not seen how Yi Chungyeong (李春卿) of our own time,
after ten thousand and eighty days over several years, is luckily sober today?
Do not be the wife of the Grand Master:
for one peep she rages that the fast has been broken.
Do not be Chungyeong's wife either:
he falls down drunk and cannot keep her company.
He is clear and I am mad, and in that we differ,
but for a wife both alike are a life gone wrong.
Better, after all, to be the wife of Liang Hong (梁鴻):
she was not ashamed of a hempen skirt and a thorn hairpin,
and their goodness matched so well, and their joy was so full,
that she lifted the tray and held it level with her brows.