English Original
a horse's mane
inserted
between pages
of the diary
he kept in prison
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
一匹馬的鬃毛
插入保存
在他監獄裡
的日記本
頁面之間
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
一匹马的鬃毛
插入保存
在他监狱里
的日记本
页面之间
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.
Bookended with visually contrasting and symbolically rich phrases, "horse's mane" and "prison," Shuji's tanka effectively builds, line by line, to an unexpected yet thematically significant and emotionally poignant ending that reveals the theme of prison life.
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