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 · 160 Chinese characters · reading time 1.6 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 14 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 one who called him the banished immortal (謫仙人)
was that mad wanderer He Zhizhang.
Had he so much as seen him come down from heaven?
This saying of old He seems absurd.
Yet when I look at the words within the poems,
how could they have come out of a human throat?
Unless his name were written on the Crimson Elixir Tower (絳藥闕),
unless his mouth had drunk the juice of red sunset clouds,
though one grind a thousand times and temper a hundred times to copy that form,
how should one spit out the brocade-like bowels of the Academician?
Great Tang had scholars in plenty,
and each seized a field of his own as a tiger seizes its prey.
Before him there was Chen Ziang, after him Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan,
and Meng Jiao and Zhang Ji besides were loud as cicadas.
How should there have been none whose words were grand and unrestrained?
How should there have been none whose writing was firm and strong?
How should there have been none whose beauty stole the loveliness of the spring flowers?
How should there have been none whose depth reached the breadth of a river?
And yet, for words that float free of all measure like these,
who but Li Bai could bear them?
Though I have not seen him ride the phoenix and drive the crane, going and coming through the Three Pure Realms (三淸),
he already seems to fly beyond the clouds in the far reaches of the sky.
That is why he was called the banished immortal,
and old He was truly not mad.