English Original
chest hollowed
voice a broken reed
my heart a bird
shot to the ground
by your anger
Gusts, 16, 2012
Sonja Arntzen
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
胸膛凹陷
聲音像是折斷的蘆葦
我的心彷彿一隻鳥
被你的憤怒
槍擊倒在地上
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
胸膛凹陷
声音像是折断的芦苇
我的心仿佛一只鸟
被你的愤怒
枪击倒在地上
Bio Sketch
Sonja Arntzen translates works of classical Japanese literature. Her most recent translation is The Sarashina Diary:Reader’s Edition (2018). Since 2005, she has been publishing her own English tanka and haiku in journals such as Gusts, Eucalypt, Kokako and Red Lights.
Enhanced by the effective use of "3 similes;" L2, L3, and Ls 4&5), Sonja's relationship builds, line by line, to a thematically significant and visually and emotionally powerful ending that reveals the theme of anger, one of the most powerful emotions in one's life.
ReplyDeleteAnd the following tanka could be read as a sequel to Sonja's:
he’s angry again
i try to escape --
the bitter taste
of hate in my mouth
is a lot like blood
Bright Stars, Volume 1, 2014
Grunge
Susan Burch's commentary: In this poem, the anger is clearly displayed and felt. The subject, if it is Grunge himself, is trying to escape the anger of someone else, and in doing so, finds that he is also angry, and in fact hates the person who is taking his/her anger out on him. The anger is intensified when he describes the taste in his mouth as blood, referring to the bitter taste of blood in general as a nasty taste, or that physically there is blood in his mouth from an escape that was thwarted by a punch to the face...