Monday, September 22, 2014

One Man's Maple Moon: Mall Tanka by Marilyn Humbert

English Original

at the mall
pigeons pick crumbs
among many feet ...
against a brick wall
the homeless beg

Skylark, 2:1, Summer 2014

Marilyn Humbert


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

商場旁
在眾多行人之間
鴿子擷取麵包屑 ...
一位像是無家可歸的人
背靠着磚牆

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

商场旁
在众多行人之间
鸽子撷取麵包屑 ...
一位像是无家可归的人
背靠着砖墙


Bio Sketch

Marilyn Humbert lives in the Northern Suburbs of Sydney NSW surrounded by bush. Her pastimes include writing free verse poetry, tanka, tanka prose and related genre. She is the leader of Bottlebrush Tanka Group and member of the Huddle and Bowerbird Tanka Groups. Her tanka appears in Australian and international journals.

1 comment:

  1. The contrasts between the two parts of the poem and a well-chosen word, beg (a slang for wannabe) spark new reflections on the issue of homelessness. This tanka reminds me of Carol Shields's "Unless."

    Below is excerpted from the Wikipedia entry, Unless:

    The novel is narrated in first person by 44-year old writer and translator, Reta Winters. The book proceeds as a linear series of reflections by Reta, elliptically coming to the thematic center of the story: the seemingly arbitrary decision of Reta's college-aged daughter Norah to drop out of university and live on the street with a cardboard sign affixed to her chest that reads "Goodness".
    Although the novel does not in any way proceed like a mystery, the reasons for Norah's departure from the normal world are Reta's primary motivation in writing. In parallel, her relationship with her French mentor (a Holocaust survivor and poet) drives much of her narration and view of herself.

    The novel deals extensively with the role of women and in particular, women's literature. Late in the novel, Reta starts to break from herself and write in character as a disenfranchised female writer. The underlying theme is that the lives of women are underwritten, ignored, and dealt with as "trivial" by the literary establishment. The novel also functions largely as an investigation into the role of writing in general (independent of gender). Reta's grief over her daughter's state makes her very inwardly focussed on the process of writing. A reflection of this is shown in the title of the book and the chapter titles. "Unless" and the chapter titles ("therefore", "else", "instead") are all words that are used to couch the fragmented manner in which life fits together. As Shields writes, "A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define [...] words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, therefore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet."

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