Monday, December 16, 2013

Butterfly Dream: Loon Haiku by Rebecca Drouilhet

English Original

a harvest moon
silvers Lake Pontchartrain ...
call of a loon

Rebecca Drouilhet


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

中秋月光
給龐恰春湖塗上一層銀白色 ...
潛水鳥的鳴聲

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

中秋月光
给庞恰春湖塗上一层银白色 ...
潜水鸟的鸣声


Bio Sketch

Rebecca Drouilhet is a fifty seven year old retired registered nurse.  She first encountered and fell in love with haiku poetry when her mother used  it as part of her curriculum.  She taught classes for the intellectually gifted. Rebecca enjoy reading and writing haiku, playing word games and spending time with her large family.

2 comments:

  1. Rebecca's emotionally effective use of synaesthesia adds one more layer of meaning to this visually riveting haiku.

    Note: Loon: 'Any of several fish-eating, diving birds of the genus Gavia of northern regions, having a short tail, webbed feet, and a laughlike cry.'

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  2. One more comment on the use of synaesthesia:

    More importantly, juxtaposed images of some haiku engage the reader in more than one sense, as can be seen in the following ones by Basho:

    Their fragrance
    Is whiter than peach blossoms
    The daffodils

    Over the even sea
    The wild ducks' cry
    Is faintly white

    It is whiter
    Than the rocks of Ishiyama
    The autumn wind



    Onions lie
    Washed in white
    How chilly it is 38

    A color is employed to suggest the quality of scent, a crying sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature. 39 As in the case of the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein argues that the montage effect of haiku results in the experience of synaesthesia or multisensory experience. 40 This characteristic helps him to develop the key principles of audiovisual montage and color-sound montage. 41

    -- excerpted from my Haiku Reality essay, titled "Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective"

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