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 · 90 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 1 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.
Man lives by eating,
and to eat he must have his teeth.
My teeth ache and I cannot take another mouthful of rice —
perhaps heaven means to kill me.
That what is hard should break is a thing one must go through,
but to have them fall out and leave a gap in old age is more shameful still.
How many are left?
They wobble, and their roots have nowhere to hold.
Now once again it hurts,
and the pain reaches all the way up to my head.
Water is too cold to drink,
and what has been boiled I cannot try either.
Thin gruel and porridge — only after testing them for cold and heat
can I barely lap at them.
How much less can I chew meat?
Though there is meat, it lies on the board in vain.
This is truly because I am old,
and it will stop only when this body is gone.
Interlinear notes 1
經 — read as 「a thing one must go through」. Taking it as the constant principle (常經), there is also the way of reading it 「that what is hard should break may be called the constant principle」. — the translator