white dawn ...
at the ocean's edge
looking, waiting
for something to take form
a seagull and I
Rebecca Drouilhet
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
白色黎明 ...
在大海的邊緣
遙望，等待
某些事物具體成形
海鷗與我
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
白色黎明 ...
在大海的边缘
遥望，等待
某些事物具体成形
海鸥与我
Bio Sketch
Rebecca Drouilhet is a 58-year old retired registered nurse. In 2012,
she won a Sakura award in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Haiku
International. Her haiku and tanka have appeared in A Hundred Gourds, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, World Haiku Review, Prune Juice, The Heron's Nest, and the Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Art.
The big difference between Rebecca's revision above and original below is the effective use of inversion that adds a sense of suspense and oneness with nature:
ReplyDeletewhite dawn
a seagull and I
at the ocean's edge
looking, waiting
for something to take form
I'll further discuss this issue related to "rhetorical anomaly" in the forthcoming 'To the Lighthouse' post.
As Ian Marshall emphasizes in Walden by Haiku, “one flaw evident in much contemporary [English language] haiku…. is that its emphasis on simplicity and invisibility of language called “wordlessness” at times leads to a flatness that often lacks any “rhetorical anomaly…,” (p. 50) a characteristic of classic Japanese haiku. In his study of haiku aesthetics (included in Chapter Two, "The Poetics of the Haiku," of his award-winning book, entitled The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter), Kōji Kawamoto notes that the appealing power of a haiku mainly stems from some "rhetorical anomaly" that "can come in the form of pun, paradox, repetition, hyperbole, something striking in the haiku's sound or its image, or some disruption of syntax or expectation -- in short, something in the language, some derivation from language's denotative function, that catches our notice." (Marshall, p.50).
ReplyDeleteThe comment above I made in 'Poetic Musings: Matsushima Haiku Attributed to Basho,' http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2014/04/poetic-musings-haiku-about-matsushima.html, is applicable to English language tanka.