Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 16
On the Pavilion by the Yeseong River, Matching the Rhymes of the Various Gentlemen on the Plaque禮成江樓上。次板上諸公韻。
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 16 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.
1First Poem
才看畫鷁簇沙頭。趁得廻潮捻不留。海客自愁風浪苦。望中無奈似閑遊。
Barely had I seen the painted-bird prows gathered on the sandbar when, riding the turning tide, they would not stay though held back. The seafarer himself grieves at the hardship of wind and wave; what is to be done, that to the watching eye it looks like idle roaming?
Interlinear notes 1
故承宣金敦中首題。
The late Kim Donjung (金敦中), Royal Secretary (承宣), wrote the first of them.
2Second Poem
漁叟停橈屢轉頭。問渠何事故成留。舟中應羡樓中樂。樓上人還羡爾遊。
The old fisherman stopped his oar and kept turning his head, so I asked what business made him linger on purpose. From within the boat he must surely envy the pleasures inside the pavilion; but the man on the pavilion, on the contrary, envies your roaming.