English Original
words stray
and float in the space
of sweet ether
between the moon in the sky
and the moon in the pond
Gusts, 36, Fall/Winter 2022
Aya Yuhki
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
言語遊蕩
並漂浮在天上月亮
和池塘裡的月亮之間
甜美氣氛
的空間裡
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
言语游荡
并漂浮在天上月亮
和池塘里的月亮之间
甜美气氛
的空间里
Bio Sketch
Aya Yuhki was born and now lives in Tokyo. She started writing tanka more than thirty years ago and has expanded her interests to include free verse poetry, essay writing, and literary criticism. Aya Yuhki is Editor-in-Chief of The Tanka Journal published by the Japan Poets’ Society. Her works are featured on the homepage of the Japan Pen Club’s Electronic Library.
Written in figurative language, Aya's tanka effectively builds, line by line, to an unexpected yet thematically significant and visually and emotionally evocative ending that reveals the theme of the power/effects of language: how words shape reality (L4), illusion (L5), and anything in between (Ls, 2&3), "the space of sweet ether."
ReplyDeleteAnd syntactic parallelism employed in Ls 4&5 adds psychological depth to the tanka.
And this tanka reminds me of the following one:
moonlight
upon the water --
why do we
give ourselves over to
beautiful illusions?
Gusts, 15, Spring/Summer 2012
Joyce Wong
Wong’s effective use of a rhetorical question emotionally enhances the suggestive power of the poem, especially of the upper verse, which alludes to a Chinese idiom: “flowers in the mirror and the moon on the water (Chinese: 鏡花水月; Japanese: Kyōka Suigetsu)”