My dead people are leaving, but are they leaving
with dignity? At chilly mid-day
plain trained hands always listen
to the sound of their zither.
Can you achieve a full concentration
by early morning practice?
In the morning it seems as if you stopped
to look back on your whole life.
His whole life he has attentively been hearing
about the Han dynasty maiden in love.
At the end he plays “Han Palace in Autumn”
as if it were some incurable disease, equally beautiful.
Hui Di (pen name Xin Hui Fan) is a poet, essayist, editor and translator living in Beijing.
Miroslav Kirin is a published poet from Croatia who has written more than ten volumes of poetry, two books of short fiction, a novel and a children’s picture book. He has read and studied contemporary Chinese poetry for almost two decades. He was invited to Beijing’s Home of International Poets within the Shangyuan Art Scene in summer 2014, where he worked with Hui Di and translated several of his poems into both Croatian and English.