English Original
having shot
a winter dove
that might be my god
I go home
with smoking gun
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
在冬 天
射殺一隻鴿子
它可能是我的上帝
回到家裡
我拿著冒煙的槍
在冬 天
射杀一只鸽子
它可能是我的上帝
回到家里
我拿着冒烟的枪
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.
Written in the style of "fiction of possibility" (the potential of fiction to create a legitimate reality0, this is a "typical" Shuji Terayama tanka that reads more like "scenes from a movie, stage play, or short story."
ReplyDeleteUnlike his poetic forefathers whose relationship with nature was harmonious, Terayama’s poetic relationship with nature is often gruesome and violent. One of the most common themes in his tanka is about a bird being shot by a gun.
it may be an angel --
this small sparrow
I shot
then returned home
smelling of gunpowder
having shot
a winter dove that
might be my god,
I go home
with smoking gun
failing even
to become an actress
I listen to
the sound of seagulls
shot in the winter marsh
for a small bird
to come back
after it's shot
there is a grassland
in my head
Fore more about his work, see "To the Lighthouse: Shuji Terayama's Tanka Poetics, 'Fiction of Possibility'," accessed at http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/06/to-lighthouse-terayama-shujis-tanka.html