Yetgeul › Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) › Latter Collection, Book 4
Eating Crab Apples on the Third Day of the Seventh Month七月三日。食林檎。
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 4 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.
摘來不待霜。肌硬肉未柔。由予嗜酸果。勉食不能休。欲吐不得吐。如梗掛其喉。云何老人舌。反落兒所求。此亦舊京物。幾人爭先搜。孰忍計其熟。坐候霜深秋。
They were picked without waiting for the frost, so the skin is hard and the flesh not soft. Because I take pleasure in sour fruit, I force them down and do not know when to stop. I would spit them out, but cannot, and they catch in my throat like thorns. How is it that an old man's tongue has sunk instead to what a child craves? These too come from the old capital, and how many have vied in rummaging for them? Who would be patient, reckoning on their ripening, and sit waiting for the deep-frost autumn?