I was breathing
in unison
with a pregnant cow
waiting for her turn
to be slaughtered
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我和懷孕的牛
生命氣息的起落
是一致
它正在等待
被宰殺
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
我和怀孕的牛
生命气息的起落
是一致
它正在等待
被宰杀
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.
... Breathing in unison is a form of deep meditation, a transference of emotion, a melding of minds. As far fetched as the following tanka appears, it is similar to the way the Miwok Indians in Northern California's High Sierra Mountains sometimes interacted with the prey they were hunting. Before a Miwok hunter would kill his prey, he'd ask the animal for permission to kill it and explain why. Terayama appears to have had an affection for animals, seeing them as equals, and not taking them for granted. Read this sensitive, poignant tanka, and decide for yourself ...
ReplyDelete-- excerpted from "Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama, A Review by Robert D. Wilson," accessed at https://simplyhaiku.com/SHv6n3/reviews/Terayama.html
rural romanticism
ReplyDeleteleft behind
at the abattoir gate