Tuesday, June 30, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Black and White Tanka by Susan Constable

English Original

a newspaper,
zebra or pair of dice --
some things
just fine as they are
in black and white

Susan Constable


Chinese Translation (Traditional)


一份報紙,
一匹斑馬或一對骰子 --
有些東西
蠻好的當它們是
白與黑的時候

Chinese Translation (Simplified)


一份报纸,
一匹斑马或一对骰子 --
有些东西
蛮好的当它们是
白与黑的时候


Bio Sketch

Susan Constable’s tanka appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Take Five. Her tanka collection, The Eternity of Waves, was one of the winning entries in the eChapbook Awards for 2012. She is currently the tanka editor for the international on-line journal, A Hundred Gourds.

Butterfly Dream: Circle of Silence Haiku by Peggy Heinrich

English Original

around the fire
the widening circle
of silence

Honorable Mention, 2005 Kaji Aso Studio Haiku Contest
                              
Peggy Heinrich


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

圍繞著火堆
不斷擴大地沉默的
圍圓圈之人

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

围绕著火堆
不断扩大地沉默的
围圆圈之人


Bio Sketch

Peggy Heinrich's haiku have appeared in almost every haiku journal both nationally and internationally and in many anthologies. Awards include Top Prize in the Yamadera Basho Memorial Museum English Haiku Contest in both 2009 and 2010. Peeling an Orange, a collection of her haiku with photographs by John Bolivar, was published in 2009 by Modern English Tanka Press. Forward Moving Shadows, a collection of her tanka, with photographs by John Bolivar, was published in 2012.

Monday, June 29, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Funeral Tanka by Keitha Keyes

English Original

no black
by request
at her funeral ...
raindrops glisten
on my silken parasol

GUSTS, 19, Spring/Summer 2014

Keitha Keyes


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

她的葬禮
要求送葬者
不要穿黑色衣服 ...
在我的絲質遮陽傘上
雨滴閃閃發光

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

她的葬礼
要求送葬者
不要穿黑色衣服 ...
在我的丝质遮阳伞上
雨滴闪闪发光


Bio Sketch

Keitha Keyes lives in Sydney but her heart is still in the Australian bush where she grew up. She mostly writes tanka and related genres, revelling in the inspiration, friendship and generosity of these writing communities. Her work appears in many print and online journals and anthologies.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Butterfly Dream: War News Haiku by Carl Seguiban

English Original

news of war
wrapped on a fish --
the smell lingers

2nd Place, Vanguard Haiku , World Haiku Review,  August2014

Carl Seguiban


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

一條魚被包裹
在一張有戰爭新聞的報紙裡--
氣味徘徊不散

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

一条鱼被包裹
在一张有战争新闻的报纸里 --
气味徘徊不散


Bio Sketch

Carl Seguiban resides in British Columbia which inspires his haiku. His poems have been published in Mayfly, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Bottle Rockets, A Hundred Gourds, Moongarlic, Presence, Under the Basho, paper wasp, The Heron's Nest, Cattails, Prune Juice among others.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Butterfly Dream: Greyhound Haiku by Helen Buckingham

English Original

another race lost in the eyes of a greyhound

Acorn, 31, Autumn 2013

Helen Buckingham


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

在灰獵犬的眼中再輸一場比賽

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

在灰猎犬的眼中再输一场比赛


Bio Sketch

Helen Buckingham was born in London, 1960 and has recently moved to Wells, Somerset. She has been writing haiku for the past two decades and her work has been placed in many awards, journals, and anthologies including: Haiku in English: the First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton, 2013).

A Room of My own: The Tempest in My Mind

loneliness
comes to sit beside my bed ...
the third night
filled with the monotone
of winter rain

at 3 a.m.
many-mouthed loneliness
self-talks out loud --
speechless, face-to-face
with my drunken shadow

Friday, June 26, 2015

Butterfly Dream: Winter Star Haiku by Freddy Ben-Arroyo

English Original

facing me
through the open window
a winter star

Kernels, Spring, 2013

Freddy Ben-Arroyo


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

透過敞開的窗戶
與我面對面  
是一顆冬日星辰

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

透过敞开的窗户
与我面对面  
是一颗冬日星辰


Bio Sketch

Freddy Ben-Arroyo is a retired professor of Structural Engineering at the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology. Born in Bulgaria, he emigrated to Israel during WWII and since then lives in Haifa. He began writing haiku 25 years ago, after Zen training. He is married, has one daughter, three grandchildren and two great-grandsons.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Lit Bedroom Window Tanka by Larry Kimmel

English Original

family in bed
and term papers graded --
he steps,
without hope, into the snowy night
to see her bedroom window lit

Simply Haiku, May 15, 2008

Larry Kimmel


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

家人已睡
打好學期論文分數--
不抱希望地,
在雪夜中他走到外面
看到她的明亮臥室窗戶

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

家人已睡
和打好学期论文分数 --
不抱希望地,
在雪夜中他走到外面
看到她的明亮卧室窗户


Bio Sketch

Larry Kimmel is a US poet. He holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Pittsburgh University, and has worked at everything from steel mills to libraries. Recent books are this hunger, tissue-thin, and shards and dust. He lives with his wife in the hills of Western Massachusetts.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Butterfly Dream: Poppy Haiku by Lavana Kray

English Original

paved front yard --
a poppy peeps
through a crack

Lavana Kray


Chinese Translation (Traditional)


鋪磚的前院 --
從裂縫中一朵罌粟花
探頭窺視

Chinese Translation (Simplified)


铺砖的前院 --
从裂缝中一朵罂粟花
探头窥视


Bio Sketch

Lavana Kray is from Iasi-Romania. She is a photographer who is interested in haiku. Her poems have been published in many online and print journals, such as Frogpond, Haiku Canada Review, Asahi Shimbun, The Mainichi, A Hundred Gourds, and Daily Haiga. She was included on the list of "European Top 100 Most Creative Haiku Authors" in 2013.

Butterfly Dream: Family Gathering Haiku by Simon Hanson

English Original

family gathering
all the odd chairs
around the pool

Highly Commended, 2013 FreeXpreSsion Haiku Competiton

Simon Hanson


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

家庭聚會
游泳池周圍
所有不匹配的椅子

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

家庭聚会
游泳池周围
所有不匹配的椅子


Bio Sketch

Simon Hanson lives in country South Australia enjoying the open spaces and nearby coastal environments.  He is excited by the natural world and relishes moments of the numinous in ordinary things. He is published in various journals and anthologies and never realised how much the moon meant to him until he started writing haiku.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Cloudy Rice Tanka by Margaret Chula

English Original

my friends tell me
that they are breaking up
I stand at the sink
-- rinse the cloudy rice over
and over again

Always Filling, Always Full, 2001

Margaret Chula


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我朋友告訴我
他們正在分手的階段
我站在水槽邊
-- 沖洗混濁的米一遍
且又一遍

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

我朋友告诉我
他们正在分手的阶段
我站在水槽边
-- 冲洗混浊的米一遍
且又一遍


Bio Sketch

Margaret Chula has published two collections of tanka: Always Filling, Always Full and Just This. She has promoted tanka through her one-woman dramatization, “Three Women Who Loved Love”, which traveled to Krakow, New York, Boston, Portland, Ottawa, and Ogaki, Japan. Maggie currently serves as president of the Tanka Society of America.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Butterfly Dream: Liquid Twilight Haiku by Kala Ramesh

English Original

liquid twilight
the tilt of a water pot
on her hip

Frogpond, 31:3, Autumn 2008

Kala Ramesh


Chinese Translation (Traditional)


水樣般黎明
在她臀部上
晃動的水鍋

Chinese Translation (Simplified)


水样般黎明
在她臀部上
晃动的水锅 


Bio Sketch

Kala Ramesh has published more than one thousand poems comprising haiku, tanka, haibun, & renku in reputed journals and anthologies in Japan, Europe, UK, Australia, USA and India. Her work can be read in two prestigious publications: Haiku 21: an anthology of contemporary English-language Haiku (Modern Haiku Press, 2012) and Haiku in English - the First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton 2013). She enjoys teaching haiku and allied genres at the Symbiosis International University, Pune.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

A Room of My Own: Confederate Flag Tanka

gunshots
bloodstained the peace
of a black church ...
the Confederate flag high
above the state house dome

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

English Original

farm gate
rusted and bent
half buried
in the boneyard
of broken promises

A Hundred Gourds, 3:1, December 2013

Marilyn Humbert


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

農場大門
鏽蝕且彎曲
一半已埋在
破碎承諾
的墓地

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

农场大门
锈蚀且弯曲
一半已埋在
破碎承诺
的墓地


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.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Butterfly Dream: Caribou Bones Haiku by Debbie Strange

English Original

on the tundra
caging a winter sky
caribou bones

Third Place, 2014 Second Annual "aha" Hortensia Anderson Awards

Debbie Strange


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

苔原上
的馴鹿骨頭
籠養冬季的天空

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

苔原上
的驯鹿骨头
笼养冬季的天空


Bio Sketch

Debbie Strange belongs to the Writers' Collective of Manitoba and several haiku and tanka organizations. Her writing has received awards and been published in numerous journals. She is a singer-songwriter and photographer whose photographs have been published and exhibited.  She is currently assembling a haiga collection. Visit her on twitter @Debbie_Strange

Friday, June 19, 2015

Poetic Musings: Spring Cold Haiku by Kawahigashi Hekigodo

春寒し/水田の上の/根なし雲
(河東碧梧桐 1873-1937)

haru samushi / mizuta no ue no / ne nashi-gumo
(Kawahigashi Hekigoto, 1873-1937)

spring cold:
a cloud without roots
over the paddy field


Comment:

I like the way Kawahigashi juxtapositions the cloud, ready to be blown in who knows what direction by the cold spring winds, with the fixed paddy field, going nowhere. The cloud is ready to move, and it will move, but this transient moment of it hovering over the field is captured in the haiku's word picture. So there's a tension (which I suppose is part of the haiku spirit) between the fixed words of the poem, and the impermanence of the moment. -- excerpted from Bernard Soames's "Haru samushi", Japanese Poetry: Filling in the Gaps, 23 April 2008

Technically speaking, the type of cutting  Kawahigashi employed in his haiku belongs to Type II Formulation (Mark Morris,"Buson and Shiki: Part One," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 44:2, pp. 410-11) (For more information about Kawahigashi's view of haiku, see "Dark Wings of Night: Kawahigashi Hekigodo and His New Trend Haiku")

Later in the seventeenth century when Danrin poets formulated their ideas about kireji, the discussion might be presented in terms of Yin-Yang metaphysics or simply in terms of a discrimination set up within a hokku between a "this" opposed to a "that." A work from 1680 put it in a refreshingly slangy way:

The kireji is that which clearly expresses a division of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang mean the existence of an interesting confrontation within a poem (okashiku ikku no uchi ni arasoi aru o iu nari). For instance, something or other presented in a hokku is that?-no, it's not that but this, etc. 46

Eisenstein, circa 1929, would have replaced Yin with thesis and Yang with antithesis and cast the whole matter in the mold of his peculiar dialectic, but he would certainly have gone along with this Japanese poet's notion of arasoi, "confrontation." "By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell -- the shot?" he asked himself in "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram." "By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision." And the phrases of hokku were, he insisted, "montage phrases," and hence they generated their meaning by a like dynamic process. 47
(For more information about the types of cutting, see "To the Lighthouse: Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting" )

Eisenstein's concept of  a "haiku as montage phrases" in relation to the Japanese notion of arasoi, "confrontation," is further explored in my Haiku Reality essay, titled “Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective:”

In his one of most famous film essays, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein stresses that the Japanese written language is representational and made up of various hieroglyphs, and he states that the hieroglyph is “the naturalistic image of an object as portrayed by the skilful hand of Ts’ang Chieh 2650 years before our era.”16 More importantly, for him the “copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs… is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused – the ideogram,”17 the picture of a concept. For example, the picture of a bird and a mouth signifies “to sing,” while the picture of a child and a mouth means “to scream.” A change in one object, from bird to child, creates not a slightly variant of the same concept, but a totally new one.18

Eisenstein’s understanding of the signifying function of ideogram is similar to that of Fenollosa and Pound, yet placing an emphasis on the consequence or product of the combination of two separate hieroglyphs. In this linguistic characteristic of the Japanese written language, he sees the basis for cinema dynamics: that is the principle behind the process of combining hieroglyphs into ideograms is applicable to the cinematographic method of montage he envisions -- “combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neural in content into intellectual contexts and series.”19 He regards film as “a kind of language and, in particular, as a kind of Imagistic picture writing composed of hieroglyphs,”20 and he goes further in claiming that “the film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning ideogram. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyph.”21

Equipped with his inspired learning of the ideogrammatic nature of Chinese and Japanese written languages, Eisenstein adopts an organic view of the shot as a montage cell.22 “Just cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.”23 For him, the individual ‘cells’ become a living cinematic whole through montage, the life principle giving meaning to raw shots.24 Confronting Pudovkin ’s view of montage as a linkage of shots, Eisenstein emphasizes that montage should be viewed as a collision of shots, a view “that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept,”25 and that among all of these collisions, the weakest one, in terms of impact, is “degraded to an even movement of both [shots] in the same direction… which would correspond with Pudovkin’s view.”26 According to Eisenstein, “linkage is merely a possible special case.”27

Utilizing the fact that the human mind is highly capable of associating ideas or images in a way that the “senses overlap, subconsciously associating one with another to produce a unified effect,”28 Eisenstein argues that film can communicate by a series of juxtaposed images that do not need a linear, narrative or consequential relationship between them.29 In the mind of the viewer, shot A followed by shot B will create a new meaning C, one that is greater than the sum of its component parts, A and B.30 For a cinema “seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts,”31 the employment of montage as a collision of shots is a “means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition…the starting point for ‘intellectual cinema.’”32.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Stirring Coffee Tanka by Ramesh Anand

English Original

stirring my coffee
anti-clockwise ...
I wonder
if everything would
go back in time

Sonic Boom, 1, December 2014

Ramesh Anand


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

逆時針地
攪拌我的咖啡 ...
我想知道
是否每件事能夠
回到過去

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

逆时针地
搅拌我的咖啡 ...
我想知道
是否每件事能够
回到过去


Bio Sketch

Ramesh Anand is an award-winning poet and  the author of  a collection of haiku, titled Newborn Smiles. Over 200 short poems have been published in 16 countries and translated into 8 languages. Akita Sakigake Shimpo President Award is his latest achievement. He blogs at http://ramesh-inflame.blogspot.com

Butterfly Dream: Chestnut Haiku by Pamela Cooper

English Original

twilight moon --
a hole in the chestnut
fills with stars

2013 Haiku Canada Members’ Anthology

Pamela Cooper


Chinese Translation (Traditional)
  
朦朧月色 --
板栗中的一個洞
填滿星星

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

朦胧月色 --
板栗中的一个洞
填满星星


Bio Sketch

Pamela Cooper has been writing haiku since the turn of the century.  Her daily walks through the colourful neighbourhoods of Montreal are a constant source of inspiration for her.  The Canadian landscape, with its everchanging seasons, provides the backdrop for many of her poems. Pamela’s haiku have appeared in various anthologies and have earned her numerous awards.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

A Room of My Own: Killing the Buddha Haiku

written in response to  Linji Yixuan's koan:  If you meet the Buddha, kill him!

killing the Buddha
in a midsummer dream --
a rash on my hand

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

One Man's Maple Moon: Perforations Tanka by Lesley Anne Swanson

English Original

perforations
along this notebook page
almost invisible
the tiny separations
that ease the final parting

First Place, 2014 TSA International Tanka Contest

Lesley Anne Swanson


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

這筆記頁面
小得幾乎看不見
的側邊穿孔
這些微小的分隔
舒解了臨別的悲痛

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

这笔记页面
小得几乎看不见
的侧边穿孔
这些微小的分隔
舒解了临别的悲痛


Bio Sketch

Lesley Anne Swanson has lived in Northern California, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest, but now calls Pennsylvania home.  Always a wordsmith, she discovered tanka in 2011 and has been enthralled ever since.