English Original
in order to sew up
the horizon
my sister hid
a silk needle
in the sewing box
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
為了把地平線
縫起來
我姐姐
將一根絲針
藏在針線盒裡
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
为了把地平线
缝起来
我姐姐
将一根丝针
藏在针线盒里
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.
There is no typical "shift-and-link" relationship between the two parts of the tanka. This is an imaginary tanka written by one of the most creative tanka poets, Shuji Terayama, many of whose tanka read "like scenes from a movie, stage play, or short story."
ReplyDeleteGenerically speaking, this tanka can be categorized as "leaping poetry," a type of "surrealist poetry" where the artistic/surreal leap bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious thought, a process that Robert Bly refers to as “riding on dragons.”
For more information about Shuji Terayama's tanka, see To the Lighthouse: Shuji Terayama's Tanka Poetics, "Fiction of Possibility," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/06/to-lighthouse-terayama-shujis-tanka.html