There they go again, stupid birds.
They’ve been flying up and down the Ridge
All fall.
As if that would bring him back.

Image: the image is a collage of Gadis Kintamani by Flickr user I Made Yanuarta DPY (license: CC BY 2.0) and FREE bird brush by Flickr user jimmy brown (license: CC BY 2.0).

Text: this is a very free translation of a poem by Wan Wei, which came to my attention through Robert Okaji’s (O at the Edges) own excellent translation. Here it is in the original Chinese:

… and here is a literal translation (courtesy of the website www.chinese-poems.com):

Fly bird go no limit
Join mountain again autumn colour
Up down Huazi Ridge
Melancholy feeling what extreme

By way of comparison (or, I suppose, parallax), here is an automated translation (from Google Translate):

A bird go without effort
Autumn Hill grass
Upper and lower half in the same
Forlorn love what level recovery

… which is also not particularly helpful.