Easter morning
even the beggar’s hair
is combed and parted
Ko, 21:10, 2007
Barry George
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
復活節早晨
連乞丐的頭髮
也梳理整齊
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
复活节早晨
连乞丐的头髮
也梳理整齐
Bio Sketch
Barry
George’s haiku have been widely published in journals and anthologies,
and in Chinese, Japanese, German, Romanian, Croatian, and French
translations. A winner of competitions including First Prize in the
Gerald Brady Senryu Contest, he is the author of Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A religious sense of renewal is visually and emotionally conveyed through the effective use of hyperbole (in the case of this poem, the "mo" (even)).
ReplyDelete... Take Basho’s haiku below for example:
1) The force of hyperbole is borne by the use of the particle “mo” (“even”) “(Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter, p. 79).
Even a thatch hut these days
sees a change of residents --
house of dolls.
The opening phrase, thatch hut (kusa no to), is a waka cliche that “calls to mind the house of a recluse who has moved here in order to free himself from the vicissitudes of the floating world “ (Ibid., p. 80). And the closing image, house of dolls, suggests that the new residents will transform a humble hut into a gaily decorated dwelling. In the haiku, the intensity of change is portrayed emphatically through the observation that even a thatched hut will undergo a change in residents. The opening phrase, “thatch hut, underscores the hyperbole with a humorous oxymoron” (Ibid.)... excerpted from my "To the Lighthouse" post, "A Rhetorical Device, Hyperbole," http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/2015/03/to-lighthouse-rhetorical-device.html
nice haiku
ReplyDelete