My Dear Readers:
I just found a flip-flop ebook version of Jun Fujita's Tanka: Poems in Exile, the first American tanka collection published in 1923. The book is divided into five sections: four sections (winter, spring, summer, and autumn) of tanka written in 4 or 5 lines and one section of short poems (FYI: Modern English Tanka Press made this fine poet's work once again accessible to the reading public in 2007, publishing Jun Fujita, Tanka Pioneer, the first and only book about the first master of tanka poetry in English).
Selected Tanka:
Winter
Among the brittled grasses,
Frosting in the moon glare,
Tombstones are
Whiter tonight.
Spring:
Milky night;
Through slender trees in drowse
A petal --
Falling.
Summer:
Midnight;
Over the lifeless sand plain,
The moon and I
Are Alone.
Autumn:
On a country road
An old woman walks;
The autumn sun casts her shadow
Long and thin.
I know it is not she,
Yet, I listen
To distant laughter,
Fleeting away.
Happy Reading
Chen-ou
Below is an excerpted from the first and only review of Jun Fujita's Tanka: Poems in Exile by Harriet Monroe, "Poetry," 26:1, April, 1925, pp. 44-47:
ReplyDelete... This book illustrates the difference between the oriental, or at least the Japanese, approach to poetry and our own. Mr. Fujita, reading Keats' Nightingale, wished to discard all but a few lines; to his more reticent taste the poem said too much, and left too little to the imagination. And to us these tanka, stripped to the bone, fail of certain intended implications; they say too little and leave us searching for the meaning in an art delicate and profound, but exotic. In this poem, for example, we get a keen picture of winter, of white on white:
Among the brittled grasses
Frosting in the moon glare,
Tombstones are
Whiter tonight.
But do we get all that the poet meant by it, all the different kinds of death, and life in death, sparkling in his mind under the moon'?
Here is one in the Spring group, and I doubt if a thousand carefully toned words could match the impres sion it gives of stillness:
Milky night;
Through slender trees in drowse
A petal --
Falling.
... the number of syllables varies here from the above fourteen -- shorter than the required seventeen of the hokku -- to thirty-seven. No doubt Mr. Fujitawisely saw no point in a precise counting of syllables in a foreign tongue; he was seeking to present the feeling, the spirit, of these beautiful brief forms of his native poetry, not the minute exactitudes of rules that govern them in their own language...