To the tune, "Spring at Wu Ling": Li Ch'ing Chao

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The Poetesss Li Ch'ing Chao (Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

To the tune, "Spring at Wu Ling"

The gentle breeze has died down.
The perfumed dust has settled.
It is the end of the time
Of flowers. Evening falls
And all day I have been too
Lazy to comb my hair.
The toilet articles are there,
But the man is gone away.
All effort would be wasted.
When I try to sing, my tears
Choke me. I dreamed my flower boat
Carried me to him, but I
Know so fragile a vessel
Won't bear such a weight of sorrow.

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"People" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.





(Don't have the translator's name, sorry.)