hush at the pond
where you spent many days
angling
your loneliness is still there
among the weeping willows
First Pprize, 5th Kokako International Tanka Competition
Djurdja Vukelic Rozic
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
你花了很多天
在寂靜的池塘邊
釣魚
在垂柳之間
你的寂寞仍然存在
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
你花了很多天
在寂静的池塘边
钓鱼
在垂柳之间
你的寂寞仍然存在
Bio Sketch
Djurdja Vukelic Rozic was born in 1956, lives in the town of Ivanic Grad, Croatia, edits magazine IRIS,
translates and writes poetry, humorous sketches, short stories, haiku
and haibun. So far she has published twenty books and
translated a number of collections and anthologies into English. And her
poetry has received thirty awards.
The winners employs a strong, even overt, pivot in the third line to enhance, quite subtly, the sense of what might have been. The isolated individual fishing perhaps made some tentative overtures towards better communication -- "angling" for connection -- even if ultimately unsuccessful. The first line and especially the first word could be read as an injunction as well as a plain, descriptive statement, like asking for silence in church, which widens the frame of reference. That the loneliness is still there suggests an enduring and unavoidable quality to it, so strong as to suggest the universal, and oh how we need the willows to do the weeping for us at times. This poem has an emotional weight that is apparent immediately and after numerous reads.
ReplyDelete--excerpted from the judge's comment, Kokako, 22, April 2015, pp 5-6.