Entering Dongnae, I Saw the Guest House Uncommonly Grand, and When Pak Said He Had Built It Long Ago While Holding the District, I Sighed a Good While and Composed a Piece to Present to Him入東萊。見客舍壯麗異常。朴君言嘗典郡時所構。嘆息良久。因賦一篇奉呈。
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 · 126 Chinese characters · reading time 1.3 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 12 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.
The guest hall of Dongnae is lavish beyond the measure of the district,
and its design is uncommonly unlike the rest — who was it that built it?
Duke Pak in former days divided the tally here,
and his governance was clear, the district well ordered and the people at leisure.
Axes like frost-blades felled the trees, and a sound like thunder rose;
chisels like snow broke down the rock, and fire flew out like stars.
At the bidding of his chin it was finished in a moment,
the bracket-blocks set at ease, propping one another with cunning.
In the winter cold that drops the fingers off there is a warm room,
and in the midsummer that melts iron the windy pavilion is right.
I have come and look up at it — how grand it is!
It brushes the void and vies with the sun, their lights shooting at each other.
The dividing and the parting of it came out of the mind's own subtlety:
broad, yet not absurdly wide; lavish, yet not beyond measure.
Had Duke Pak's eye-sockets not been large,
then though vast sums of gold were spent, few things could match it.
If from the seat of the Three Dukes he one day lays the state's foundation,
his propping up of the royal house will be like this hall.