English Original
withering
the sunflowers still
in offering
at my father’s tomb --
it’s shorter than I
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
枯萎的
一束向日葵
仍作為供品
放在我父親的墳墓上 --
它比我矮
枯萎的
一束向日葵
仍作为供品
放在我父亲的坟墓上 --
它比我矮
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.
The sharp contrast between the emotionally poignant and symbolically rich prefatory image of Ls 1-4 and the matter-of-the-fact tone of the succinct closing statement, L5 is thought-provoking, revealing something hidden yet significant about the speaker's personality or relationship with his/her deceased father.
ReplyDeleteFor more about Shuji's tanka and his view of tanka poetics, see "To the Lighthouse: Shuji Terayama's Tanka Poetics, 'Fiction of Possibility'," accessed at https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/06/to-lighthouse-terayama-shujis-tanka.html
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