English Original
cramming
a fall universe
into five lines down
pen in hand
the seaside bench hard
This Short Life: Minimalist Tanka, 2014
Sanford Goldstein
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
秋季的天地
塞滿寫進
五行詩中
一筆在手
坐在海邊硬板凳上
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
秋季的天地
塞满写进
五行诗中
一笔在手
坐在海边硬板凳上
Bio Sketch
Sanford Goldstein has been publishing tanka for more than fifty years. He was born in 1925 and is now 95 years old. Long ago, he wrote haiku, but decided to focus on tanka. His latest books, three in the last two years, have each said this would be his last.
cramming
ReplyDeletea fall universe
into five lines down,
pen in hand,
the seaside bench hard
I want to push
these lines out,
out,
out into this October light
to the very edge!
To cram a universe into five lines, to push to the very edge of what the form can do, the poet must be willing to spill thousands of tanka. Those of us among his readers who also attempt to write— those of us who tend to think “Oh, I already wrote about that,” and then stop— we might learn something from Goldstein’s willingness to return to the same themes, the same images, even the same words, in multiple poems. ...
-- excerpted from "A Poet's Roving Thoughts: Review of This Short Life by Jenny Ward Angyal," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-poets-roving-thoughts-review-of-this.html