in the end
there's no such thing
as exciting despair --
outside the factory
pure green wheat
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
終究
沒有所謂令人興奮
的絕望 --
在工廠外面
純綠色的小麥田
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
终究
没有所谓令人兴奋
的绝望 --
在工厂外面
纯绿色的小麦田
Bio Sketch
The
avant-garde stage and film director, poet, critic, author and founder
of the experimental theater group Tenjo Sajiki, Shuji Terayama was born
in 1935 in Aomori, Japan. He started writing tanka in his late teens and
received the Tanka Kenkyu Award for Emerging Poets. He published
several tanka collections before he stopped writing at the age of 30.
Many of his tanka read more like scenes from a movie scene or short
story. He died in 1983. The first English language collection of his
tanka, Kaleidoscope, was published by The Hokuseido Press in 2008 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death.
The opening thematically and emotionally dialectical statement is firmly grounded in the closing image replete with visual and emotional contrasts (monotonous factory life vs pure green wheat fields, ...). Shuji's thought-provoking tanka reminds me of one of my tanka which I think could be read as a prequel:
ReplyDeleteon the way
to the meat factory
where I work,
bare maple trees . . .
beyond them, bare maple trees
Gusts, 23, Spring/Summer 201