I’ve lived in the country long enough to know its many joys.
I was starting to feel like a child back in my old village again,

and suddenly, leaving the city today, I leave all that dust behind:
turning to mountains and valleys, I feel them enter my eyes.

translated by David Hinton

How many years have you slept on the sea bottom!
Time has not passed in vain,
A rainbow of light flashing over your uneven shell
Glitters freely, suffused in coral pink.
A true pearl
Is not the perfect one.

Pearls cultivated on a production schedule
Have a regular, plump-eared surface.
A handful of them, all the same size,
Show off their brilliance encircling
Pretty wrists and necks; they are most perfect,
But they are not real pearls.

Nothing seems more like pearls than virtue does:
The truest probably don’t look the most beautiful,
The most beautiful probably aren’t the truest.
My heart and soul are always
Enchanted by the uneven pearl
Because it carries messages from the ocean
And owns a sincerity for which I yearn.

translated by Fang Dai, Dennis Ding, & Edward Morin

Sure
I’ve done wrong
because of the hang-ups of my heart
because I couldn’t grab
these beautiful mountains     these beautiful valleys
here      under sky
here on the earth

translated from the Quiche & French editions by Nathaniel Tarn

You have seen the blossoms among the leaves;
Tell me, how long will they stay?
Today they tremble before the hand that picks them;
Tomorrow they wait someone’s garden broom.
Wonderful is the bright heart of youth,
But with years it grows old.
Is the world not like these flowers?
Ruddy faces, how can they last?

translated  by Burton Watson

My voice speaks out
to your lips,
to your face:
give me thirteen times twenty days,
thirteen times twenty nights,
to bid farewell
to the face of my mountains,
the face of my valleys,
where once I roamed
to the four world-ends,
the four world-quarters,
seeking and finding
to feed me
and live.

translated into Spanish by Prologo de Francisco Monterde, then into English by John Bierhorst

you sit in rooms
listening to people talking about
the bible/aquariums/carving coconuts
and struggle to keep your eyes open
you keep seeing her car instead
parked in someone else’s driveway
at night, all night, till morning
see the pictures in your head
of what transpires in the dark
fool, you say
missing what was never yours
fool, fool
fool

Sssh the sea says
Sssh the small waves at the shore say, sssh
Not so violent, not
So haughty, not
So remarkable,
Sssh
Say the tips of the waves
Crowding around the headland’s
Surf. Sssh
They say to people
This is our earth
Our eternity.

translated by Robert Bly