English Original
I gently comb
the turtledove
with my dead mother’s
scarlet comb --
its down keeps falling out
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
使用亡母
的猩紅梳子
我輕柔地梳理
一隻斑鳩的羽毛 --
它的羽絨不斷地脫落
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
使用亡母
的猩红梳子
我轻柔地梳理
一只斑鸠的羽毛 --
它的羽绒不断地脱落
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 visually and emotionally poignant tanka is a typical one where Shuji Terayama's tanka poetics, "fiction of possibility," is employed.
ReplyDeleteThe following is a relevant excerpt from "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
... By "fiction of possibility," Terayama claims "the potential of fiction to create a legitimate reality" (one in which he truly possessed a consciousness that sold the communist newspaper, Red Flag) (ibid., p. 30). Shortly after winning the national tanka contest, he commented on his tanka, saying, "In terms of method, I am attempting to grasp the point of contact between neorealism and emotion" (ibid.), and he insisted that "this new 'fiction of possibility' maintains a form of authenticity and a legitimate sincerity" (ibid.). Through his tanka, Terayama argues for a "rational acceptance of the reality of his fictionalized and fictionalizing poet self -- a loyalty (shared with his readers) to the veracity of imagination, which trumps the typical bindings of factual existence" (ibid.).
Terayama’s tanka are unique in that they are based mainly on his imagination, which is often colored by his complex feelings of being "abandoned" by his mother, and that they are interwoven with cultural memory, personal mythology, and the emotions he experienced in his dysfunctional life and inner turmoil...