Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 6
Chanted Again Upon the Road路上又吟
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 6 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.
萬里長途獨去身。馬頭頻啑爲何人。朝衰暮落雙蓬鬂。南去東還一葛巾。繞縣靑山橫似郭。滿畦黃稻積如囷。行人歌笑居人樂。此是昇平第幾春。
Ten thousand li of long road, and a body going alone; my horse's head sneezes again and again — for whose sake? Two mugwort-tangled temples, withering at dawn and falling at dusk; one hempen cap, gone south and now returning east. The green hills ringing the county slant like a rampart; the yellow rice filling the paddies is heaped like granaries. Travellers sing and laugh, and those who dwell here are glad — in how many springs of a reign of peace is this one?