English Original
On a country road
An old woman walks;
The autumn sun casts her shadow
Long and thin.
Tanka: Poems in Exile, 1923
Jun Fujita
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
一位老婦人
走在鄉間小路上；
秋日陽光投射她的影子
又長又單薄。
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
一位老妇人
走在乡间小路上；
秋日阳光投射她的影子
又长又单薄。
Bio Sketch
Jun Fujita (1888-1963) was born in a village near Hiroshima, Japan, and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. By 1915, he was in Chicago, where he worked for the Evening Post, known as the first Japanese-American photo-journalist. He was also an accomplished poet, arguably the first master of tanka poetry in English. He certainly was a master of the rhetoric of omission or, as he put it, "that fine and illusive mood, big enough to illuminate the infinity of the universe," which is a defining characteristic of tanka. And his Tanka: Poems in Exile, first English language collection of tanka, was published in 1923. The flip-flop ebook version can be found here.
The five poetic phrases/ku of a tanka is formatted as a quatrain, no doubt to meet Western expectations of what a poem is supposed to look like, but it is highly irregular: 5-5-8-3 syllables. If the third line is broken into two, then the pattern becomes 5-5-4-4-3.
ReplyDeleteOn a country road
An old woman walks;
The autumn sun
casts her shadow
Long and thin.
Jun's shasei tanka is visually and emotionally evocative, carrying symbolic significance. This journey tanka works well on two levels, literal and symbolic.