English Original
let’s sever
my stinky blood relationship --
the winter axe is placed
upside down
in a sunny spot
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
讓我們切斷
我那發臭的血緣關係 --
一把冬季的斧頭
倒掛
在陽光照耀之處
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
让我们切断
我那发臭的血缘关系 --
一把冬季的斧头
倒挂
在阳光照耀之处
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 is a symbolically rich and visually and emotionally contrasting example of Shuji's "confessional fiction" tanka.
ReplyDeleteBy “fiction of possibility," Terayama seems to claim the potential of fiction to create a legitimate reality.
-- Steven Ridgely
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.
withering
the sunflowers still
in offering
at my father’s tomb --
it’s shorter than I
a man, who knows
my dead father’s
shoe size,
came to see me one day
... nightmare
fixed
with my cold gunshot
a sparrow on the roof
might be
my mother
coming alone
to the sold rice field
on a winter night
I'm burying
my mother's scarlet comb
I gently comb
the turtledove
with my dead mother's
scarlet comb --
its down keeps falling out
this wind
carrying carrot seeds
connects
the orphan,
sunset, and me
birds banished
from the sky,
time, beasts
all collected here
in my arc-like toy box
in order to sew up
the horizon
my sister hid
a silk needle
in the sewing box
while an ant
toiled from the dahlia
to the ash tray
I was forming
a beautiful lie
-- excerpted 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