being of mixed blood
I feel lonely
even if I win --
I walk along chewing
a hot grass stalk
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
因為是混血
即使打架贏了
我也感到孤獨 --
一邊走路一邊咀嚼
一根熱草莖
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
因为是混血
即使打架赢了
我也感到孤独 --
一边走路一边咀嚼
一树根热草茎
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.
Shuji's mixed blood tanka is a fine example where he used the "coupled images" to explore the impact, physical and psychological, of being of mixed blood, and the speaker's "existential attitude" toward this mixed identity/ethnicity.
ReplyDelete... in one tanka; that is, one image in kaminoku (the initial 3 phrases) and the other in shimonoku (the latter 2 phrases) of one tanka, ... which produced a spark from the collision. -- excerpted from The Prism of Mokichi, p 177.
... from the viewpoint of tanka history, he introduced a new horizon to the tanka world by uniting two disparate things,... in one tanka ... which produced a spark from the collision.
Technically speaking, this is a good example of what American poet Archibald MacLeish calls "coupled images:" One image is established by words which make it sensuous and vivid to the the eyes or ears or touch-to any of the senses. Another image is put beside it. And "a meaning appears which is neither the meaning of one image nor the meaning of the other nor even the sum of both but a consequence of both -- a consequence of both in their conjunction, in their relation to each other" (Krishna Rayan, Suggestion and Statement in Poetry, p.69). It is in the "space between'" that the poem grows. And atmospherically speaking, the collocation of "hens and a knife sharpener" makes the poem emotionally effective as a suspenseful piece of writing. It draws readers into a story and creates a sense of momentum...
excerpted from "To the Lighthouse: Coupled Images," accessed at https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/04/to-lighthouse-coupling-of-images.html