Happy Shostakovich Day 2K7

Too early fallen asleep here, I'm alive,
though fate says dead. I've moved; my lodging's new.
I'm living in your thoughts. You miss me too.
While love lives on in lovers, I survive.

* * *

Here I'm thought dead. Alive, I comforted
the world by being there. A thousand souls
played in my heart a thousand loving roles.
Now I'm but one soul less. That means I'm dead?

-- Michelangelo Buonarroti, trans. John Frederick Nims

Happy centennial-plus-one-of-Shostakovich's-birth. He set the quatrains above (in an unrelated Russian translation) as the song "Immortality" in his Suite on Sonnets of Michelangelo, op. 145. Note the closeness of the poetic trope to Douglas Hofstadter's concept of soul-sharing as laid out in I Am A Strange Loop (discussed previously).