English Original
autumn rains ...
in the field a half sunk
paper boat
Third Prize, 2018 Wild Plum Haiku Contest
Kanchan Chatterjee
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
秋雨 ...
在田間一艘紙船
下沉了一半
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
秋雨...
在田间一艘纸船
下沉了一半
Bio Sketch
Kanchan Chatterjee is a fifty year old government service holder in the finance department of Government of India. He writes poems, especially haiku, tanka and haibun. He has won several haiku awards and has been published in various online and print poetry journals. His haiku appeared regularly in NHK’s program, "Haiku Masters," in Japan. He was a ‘Pushcart Award’ nominee in 2012.
After the first reading I started to wonder what a paper boat can do on the field especially in the fall. Can such an image be taken from reality? The more I thought about it, the more possible interpretations appeared. I suddenly realized that I had spent a lot of time thinking about this haiku. This poem works like a “thought catcher”.
ReplyDelete– Gabriel Sawicki, accessed at https://wildplumhaiku.wordpress.com/haiku-contest-2018/
Kanchan's haiku is structured with an emotional undercurrent that runs through evocative imagery of a half-sunk paper boat in the autumn rain.
His middle-of-the-story haiku works well as a mood poem. And it reminds me of my own paper boat haiku below:
a paper boat
sailing into the moon . . .
migrants on the shore
Back Cover Haiku, Sailing into the Moon: Haiku Canada Members' Anthology 2016
Editors' Comment: We found your poem poignant and relevant in the way it spoke to the fragile state of the flood of immigrants into Europe.