Thursday, April 11, 2013

One Man’s Maple Moon: Phone-In Tanka by Helen Buckingham

English Original

3 am
whispers
in my ear...
another phone-in
on loneliness

Modern English Tanka, 10, Winter 2008

Helen Buckingham


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

凌晨三點
在我的耳朵
低語
另一通聽眾電話
談論寂寞

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

凌晨叁点
在我的耳朵
低语
另一通听众电话
谈论寂寞


Bio Sketch

Helen Buckingham lives in Bristol, England. She has been writing tanka for about the last decade or so, and in 2009 took third place in the annual Saigyo Awards. In 2011 she had a tanka collection published alongside (and produced by) Canada's Angela Leuck, titled Little Purple Universes. Buckingham's most recent work is a solo collection comprising a mix of western and Japanese forms (including tanka) titled Armadillo Basket (Waterloo Press, UK, 2012).

1 comment:

  1. The allusive L1 successfully sets the emotive context, making this tanka effective as a poetic rendering of "[Loneliness] loves company."

    Living in an era that had no programs where the audience could participate by telephone, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the famous line "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning" in "The Crack-Up," a collection of essays.

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