English Original
a moment between
lighthouse flashes
cold smell of fish
A Leap in the Light, 1991
David Cobb
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
燈塔照明燈光
閃爍之間的片刻
魚的冰冷腥味
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
灯塔照明灯光
闪烁之间的片刻
鱼的冰冷腥味
Bio Sketch
David Cobb was a British educational writer and champion of English-language haiku and haibun genres. He founded the British Haiku Society in 1990 and served as its president from 1997 to 2002. He won four Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards, and the 1997 collection of haibun, Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, established him as the "initiator of the haibun in Britain."
Here is one of David’s best-known haiku, remarkable still for its fresh, immediate synaesthesia:
ReplyDeleteA lesser poet than David might’ve chosen to omit ‘a moment’, which, on the face of it, appears superfluous, but that would’ve considerably weakened the power of this masterpiece. Whilst less is generally more in haiku, here a little bit more is definitely more: those two words enable a visual and sonic pause at the end of line one which enhances the surprise of the second line; and it also enables a subtle repetition in ‘cold’ of the ‘o’ sound in ‘moment’, which helps to knit the poem together. That lesser poet might also have been tempted to shove a definite article before ‘cold’, but, again, that would’ve been ruinous because that absence draws the maximum impact out of ‘cold’, and out of the monosyllabic incantation of the last line.
-- excerpted from Matthew Paul, "David Cobb, 1926-2020," accessed at https://matthewpaulpoetry.blog/2020/11/14/david-cobb-1926-2020/