Japanese Original by Tawara Machi
Saku koto mo chiru koto mo naku ten ni muku denshinbashira ni fuku haru no kaze
English Translation by Eiji Sekine
The telephone pole
stands straight towards the sky,
with no buds to bloom
or flowers to scatter.
Spring wind breathes around.
Commentary: ...
The
telephone pole is defamiliarized here and viewed as a barren plant,
which does not bloom nor play with the wind. It stands still, stiff, and
indifferent to the arrival of the spring. The narrator's emptiness is
thus expressed by identifying with this lifeless flower
-- Eiji Sekine, "Notes on the Tanka and Tawara Machi," Simply Haiku, 4:3, Autumn 2006
The
term “defamiliarization” was first coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his
1917 seminal essay, “Art as Technique” (Crawford, p. 209), and
essentially, he emphasizes that “Poetic speech is framed speech ... Prose is ordinary speech"
(Shklovsky, p. 20). For him, this fundamental distinction between
artistic language and everyday language applies to all artistic forms:
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.
The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged. (Ibid., p. 16)...
-- excerpted from
To the Lighthouse: A Rhetorical Device, Defamiliarization
