Monday, November 9, 2020

One Man's Maple Moon: Captive Days Tanka by Shuji Terayama

English Original

submerging them
in the water
of a night-dark stream
I wash my military shoes
from those captive days

Kaleidoscope, 2007

Shuji Terayama


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

將那些被俘虜日子
所穿的軍鞋
沉浸在一條
漆黑的溪水裡
我用力洗清

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

将那些被俘虏日子
所穿的军鞋
沉浸在一条
漆黑的溪水里
我用力洗清 
 
 
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.

1 comment:

  1. ... Terayama's father, who was a policeman, died in the war when Terayama was nine. Terayama's mother started working in the US military base in Misawa, Aomori, in order to make a living, and when Terayama was in junior high, she left home and moved to Fukuoka, Kyushu, with her "boss" in order to work in the US base there. Terayama lived with his uncle until he moved to Tokyo to attend Waseda University. Many of his well-known tanka were written in his high school and university days.

    For this article, I selected some of Terayama's fiction tanka from our manuscript and wrote some notes.

    submerging them
    in the water
    of a night-dark stream,
    I wash my military shoes
    from those captive days

    (If we read this tanka without any knowledge about Terayama, we would think the author went to the war. The reality is that Terayama's father was sent to the war and never came back.) ...

    -- excerpted from "Dark Wings of Night: Tanka of Shuji Terayama by Kozue Uzawa" (first published in "Simply Haiku," 5:3, Autumn 2007), accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2018/07/dark-wings-of-night-tanka-of-shuji.html

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