English Original
Milky night;
Through slender trees in drowse
A petal --
Falling.
Tanka: Poems in Exile, 1923
Jun Fujita
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
銀河之夜;
在困乏中穿過細長的樹林
一片花瓣 --
墜落。
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
银河之夜;
在困乏中穿过细长的树林
一片花瓣 --
坠落。
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.
Under the milky night, L1, the slow descent of a petal through the trees depicted in Ls 2-4 is visually and emotionally evocative.
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