1. Who are you? Why are you here? Why
Did you die while life was in its prime?

2. The specter of death terrifies, evoking panic,
And everyone flees to hide.

3. How did you come to love it? What drew you
To hasten in choosing its company?

4. Eagerly embracing it, yearning
To meet it, dreading to flee it?

5. Is it the soul in you that went too far
For minds to comprehend?

6. Or is it the body, too confined
For a free spirit it was burdened beyond its capacity?

7. You are not dead. Rather, you are alive, though
Death cast its pallid shadow upon you.

8. A person lives on through what he leaves
Behind in both worlds - his traces.

9. How many graves hide the living! How many
Walk the earth, dead, with no grave!

10. The grave is but the body's rest from
Its pain, the heart's from its sorrows.

11. A person's existence in the cosmos is a mystery.
So too is eternity, one of its secrets.

12. Grow larger, O graves! A guest comes
Unlike the living in all aspects.

13. People go to the grave against their will,
While he came of his own choice.

14. A poet who saw life only as a night
Of beastliness, and death the dawn.

15. A speaker who delivered great lessons
From the pulpit of death by his suicide.

16. He shunned life with disdain - is there in life
Anything that merits other than disdain?

17. All it contains is sorrow upon sorrow
Consumed between its night and day.

18. The lifespan of misery is long.
Wretched is he who busies himself shortening it.

19. There is no shame in suicide - it is better
Than living in humiliation and shame.

20. I did not summon eloquence until it disobeyed me
Once I knew my playful life was nearing its end.

21. Oh my poetry, mourning the loss of its rhymes!
My lute weeping for its strings!