Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Butterfly Dream: Donkey's Hee-Haw Haiku by George Swede

English Original

no sure answers
to life's questions
donkey's hee-haw  

Modern Haiku, 41:2, 2010

George Swede


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

人生問題
沒有確定的答案
驢的刺耳叫聲

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

人生问题
没有确定的答案
驴的刺耳叫声


Bio Sketch

George Swede's most recent collections of haiku are Almost Unseen (Decatur, IL: Brooks Books, 2000) and Joy In Me Still (Edmonton: Inkling Press, 2010). He is a former editor of Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America (2008-2012) and a former Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives (2008-2009).

2 comments:

  1. Is the 'answer' stated in Ls 1&2 one of those 'sure answers'? The veiled authorial comment is skillfully made through the loud, harsh cry of the donkey whose presence in philosophical texts is 'though more discrete, not less significant.'

    For example, one of the famous cases regarding the 'philosophical donkey,' is that the scholastic doctor Jean Buridan (Joannes Buridanus, 1292-1363) depicted the donkey faced with a dilemma: how to choose between a pail of oats and a bucket of water.

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  2. Another good case is the donkey in The Metamorphoses of Apuleius (which St. Augustine referred to as The Golden Ass), the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety,

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