English Original
it may be my angel --
this small sparrow
I shot
then returned home
smelling the gunpowder
Kaleidoscope, 2007
Shuji Terayama
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
這可能是我的天使 --
我射殺
一隻小麻雀
然後就回家
但仍然聞到火藥味
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
这可能是我的天使 --
我射杀
一只小麻雀
然后就回家
但仍然闻到火药味
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 reality), 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