after the pictures
snow flakes on the park bench
where you smiled
Blithe Spirit, 15:3, 2005
John Kinory
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
拍照之後
雪花落在公園長凳上
在這裡你曾笑了
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
拍照之後
雪花落在公园长凳上
在这里你曾笑了
Bio Sketch
John
Kinory is a translator and photographer, and former physics teacher.
His work has been published extensively in haiku, tanka and general
poetry journals worldwide. He is the founder and editor of Ardea, the multilingual short-form poetry journal. He lives in England.
John's haiku is tightly structured with a deep emotional undercurrent, and the Woolfian "moment of being" is keenly captured in L3, which sparks the reader's reflection on transience of time/life.
ReplyDeleteNote: below is excerpted from Nicole L. Urquhart's "Moments of Being in Virginia Woolf's Fiction," accessed at http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/matrix/urquhart.htm
Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view and her use of stream of consciousness have influenced many writers that followed her. But one particularly interesting technique that does not seem to receive much attention is her use of "moments of being."
She first mentions moments of being in her essay, "A Sketch of the Past," which was to be the beginning of her memoirs. She begins with one of her earliest memories: a night in the nursery at St. Ives. She vividly recalls the way the blinds fluttered in the wind, the light coming through the window and the sound of the sea. She had a feeling of "lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow" (65). This memory is so strong that when she recalls those sensations they become more real for her than the present moment.
This observation leads her to wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable--even if the events themselves are unimportant--that they can be vividly recalled while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: moments of being and non-being.
Woolf never explicitly defines what she means by "moments of being." Instead she provides examples of these moments and contrasts them with moments of what she calls "non-being." She describes the previous day as:
Above the average in 'being.' It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like--there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book . . . which interested me. (70)
She experiences each of these acts intensely and with awareness. But she continues to say that these moments were embedded in more numerous moments of non-being. For example, she does not remember what she discussed with her husband over tea.