One Man's Maple Moon: Distant Laughter Tanka by Jun Fujita

English Original

I know it is not she,

Yet, I listen

To distant laughter,

Fleeting away.  

Tanka: Poems in Exile, 1923

Jun Fujita

Chinese Translation (Traditional)

我知道不是她，

然而，我還是聆聽

遠方的笑聲，

但它轉瞬即逝。

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

我知道不是她，

然而，我还是聆听

远方的笑声，

但它转瞬即逝。

Bio Sketch

Jun Fujita (1888-1963) was born in a village near Hiroshima, Japan, and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. By 1915, he was in Chicago, where he worked for the Evening Post, known as the first Japanese-American photo-journalist. He was also an accomplished poet,  arguably the first master of tanka poetry in English. He certainly was a master of the rhetoric of omission or, as he put it, "that fine and illusive mood, big enough to illuminate the infinity of the universe," which is a defining characteristic of tanka. And his Tanka: Poems in Exile, first English language collection of tanka, was published in 1923. The flip-flop ebook version can be found here.