Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Former Collection, Book 28
Letter submitted to the Emperor of the Mongols — note accompanying the gifts蒙古皇帝上起居表 物狀
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 28 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.
云云。僻土下臣。久曠俟藩之禮。殘邦薄產。又非天府之容。前件物等。品色未精。名般最少。雖有輕干之愧。尙憑大度之寬。云云。
A lowly vassal of a remote land, I have long left empty the rite of serving as a country of the hedge. And the poor produce of a worn-out country is not a thing fit to be taken into the Son of Heaven's storehouse. The foregoing articles are not fine in quality or colour, and few indeed in kind. There is in it the shame of a light trespass, yet still I lean upon the generosity of your great magnanimity.