Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 19
Encomium on the Ink Bamboo (墨竹) of An, the Retired Scholar (處士)安處士墨竹贊
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 19 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.
棄庵居士。於竹通仙。一掃其眞。暗契自然。手爲心使。嘗以心傳。心指手應。物何逃焉。竹故見之。莫藏其天。一節一葉。盡呈其全。人與筆逝。邈若千年。尺紈遺迹。價抵萬錢。
The Lay Devotee Giam was at one with bamboo as an immortal is. With one sweep he drew its true form and matched nature without anyone's knowing. The hand is what the mind employs, and he had long handed it on by the mind. When the mind points, the hand answers, and how should a thing escape him? So the bamboo too, seeing him, could not hide what was inborn in it. Down to a single joint and a single leaf, it showed forth its whole self. The man and the brush are gone together, and it is as remote as a thousand years. The traces left on a foot of silk are worth as much as ten thousand coins.
Interlinear notes 1
常自號棄庵居士
He always called himself the Lay Devotee Giam (棄庵居士).