birds banished
from the sky,
time, beasts
all collected here
in my arc-like toy box
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
天空中
被放逐的鳥，
時間，野獸
全部收集在我的
弧形玩具盒中
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
天空中
被放逐的鸟，
时间，野兽
全部收集在我的
弧形玩具盒中
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.
This poem is a fine example of Terayama-esque visually arresting and emotionally poignant surrealist tanka that stirs the reader's emotions and refection.
ReplyDelete... [Shuji Terayama] created his own mythology; a synthesis of truth, half truths, and a surreal imagination, tools used to transcend tradition and staid boundaries, to overcome personal sadness and inner rage, building short poems that broke rules, admired rules -- a yin yang of contradiction and unpredictability...
-- excerpted from A Review of "Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama," Robert D. Wilson, Simply Haiku, 6:3, Autumn 2008, accessed at https://simplyhaiku.com/SHv6n3/reviews/Terayama.html
For more information about Shuji Terayama's tanka poetics, See my "To the Lighthouse," post, "Shuji Terayama's Tanka Poetics, 'Fiction of Possibility'," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/06/to-lighthouse-terayama-shujis-tanka.html
By “fiction of possibility," Terayama seems to claim the potential of fiction to create a legitimate reality.
-- Steven Ridgely
Tanka is confessional fiction.
-- Chen-ou Liu