this wind
carrying carrot seeds
connects
the orphan,
sunset, and me
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
這個大風
攜帶胡蘿蔔種子
連接
一個孤兒
夕陽和我
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
这个大风
携带胡萝蔔种子
连接
一个孤儿
夕阳和我
Bio Sketch
The
avant-garde stage and film director, poet, critic, author and founder
of the experimental theater group Tenjo Sajiki, Shuji Terayama was born
in 1935 in Aomori, Japan. He started writing tanka in his late teens and
received the Tanka Kenkyu Award for Emerging Poets. He published
several tanka collections before he stopped writing at the age of 30.
Many of his tanka read more like scenes from a movie scene or short
story. He died in 1983. The first English language collection of his
tanka, Kaleidoscope, was published by The Hokuseido Press in 2008 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death.
Surrealism of the Pre-War period laid the basis for the avant garde of the Post-War and for some of Terayama’s tanka. At times he expresses an ethereal connection with the cosmos.
ReplyDeletethis wind
carrying carrot seeds
connects
the orphan,
sunset, and me
Seeds are the beginning cycle of new life and of an orange plant like colours in the sunset. The sunset is the ending of a time cycle, the day. The orphan could be the lost, forlorn child Terayama thought he once was. The life bearing wind swirls over the earth catching up the phantasmal colours of the sunset,Terayama, and the forlorn orphan in one luminous union of being.
-- excerpted from "The Scarlet Comb: Poetics and Poetry of Shuji Terayama" by Linda Galloway, Cattails, January 2014, accessed at http://cattailsjournal.com/backissues/cattails141.pdf