English Original
I spit
on tonight’s lonely
maneuver,
I floss,
I scribble poems
This Short Life: Minimalist Tanka, 2014
Sanford Goldstein
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我唾棄
今晚的寂寞
表演，
我用牙線剔牙
我塗寫幾首詩
我唾弃
今晚的寂寞
表演，
我用牙线剔牙
我涂写几首诗
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.
Written in a traditional style of "Onihishigitei (demon-quelling force, characterized by its “strong or even vulgar diction," "Japanese Court Poetry," Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 406), Sanford's "I tanka" effectively depicts its speaker's character through a well-chosen set of verbs, with a [lonely] performative act, "maneuver," in the central line.
ReplyDeleteAnd it might be interesting to do a comparative reading of my "loneliness tanka" below :
at midnight
my thoughts and hand moving
across the page:
I tanka-barricade
the door to loneliness
Skylark 3:2, Winter 2015
FYI: For more information about Onihishigitei, see my "To the Lighthouse" post, "Onihishigitei, Style of Demon-Quelling Force," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2013/05/to-lighthouse-onihishigitei-style-of.html