The Flowers of Mei Plum Are Falling. Chinese Classical Poetry

Leonid Bezgin, translator and compiler:
"All translated poems are divided into sections. In accordance with Chinese tradition, I call them scrolls. This allows me to take them out of cases with satin cushions and bone fasteners, hang them on the wall, admire them as an ink painting connoisseur admires a rare landscape, and then put them away again, so as not to let the eye get used to them and lose the freshness of perception, so highly valued by the Chinese. For me (and I hope for the reader too) this is a kind of game - throwing pebbles into a stream, which the Chinese poet loves to do. Moreover, the game is for him both a pastime and entertainment, and a very serious expenditure of mental effort, since the deep essence of any game is that it corresponds to cosmic rhythms and in some way expresses the pulsation of the Universe."