Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 8
Again Using the Rhymes of Dongpo's Poem, I Give It to Him又用東坡詩韻贈之
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 8 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.
鮎魚緣竹一何遲。漸愧頭銜似昔時。只爲別來長飽戀。故應相見更多姿。詩敎雪暈微侵鬢。酒放春紅半蘸肌。我亦參禪老居士。祖師林下舊橫枝。
How slow is the catfish's climbing of the bamboo! I grow ever more ashamed that my office title is as it was of old. Only because since our parting I have always been filled full with longing, therefore, seeing one another, there is the more grace in it. Poetry lets the halo of snow trespass a little on my temples, and wine looses a spring redness that half soaks my skin. I too am an old layman who sits in Zen, an old slanting branch beneath the patriarch's grove.