Tuesday, December 6, 2022

One Man's Maple Moon: Hourglass Tanka by Denis M. Garrison

English Original

and when 
the sand runs out? 
the stillness 
of the hourglass 
and I are one

Ash Moon Anthology, 2008 

Denis M. Garrison


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

什麼時候
細沙子流完了?
此時沙漏
的寂靜
和我是合一

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

什么时候
细沙子流完了?
此时沙漏
的寂静
和我是合一


Bio Sketch

Denis M. Garrison, from Iowa, now lives in Maryland. His childhood was spent in Japan, youth in Europe, Africa and western Pacific. His poetry’s widely published. Garrison’s print collections include First Winter Rain, Eight Shades of BlueHidden RiverSailor in the Rain and Other Poems, and Fire Blossoms.

1 comment:

  1. The rhetorical question in the upper verse is used to evoke a well-known Western literary image of the sands of time running out, effectively establishing the thematic and emotional context for the poem. And then "the stillness," the structural focus of the poem, is inserted between the upper verse and the lower, "where the conventions of the West lead us to expect a homily about the fleeting nature of time, pleasure, glory, et cetera, Garrison's embrace of stillness is an unexpected surprise" (M. Kei, "Introduction," Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume II, 2009), reshaping our most existential sense of being in the flow of time in a radical way.

    And it might be interesting to do a thematic comparative reading of the following tanka:

    layers
    of this blue life
    winnowed
    by the hourglass
    my furrows deepen

    Poetry Nook, 5, April 2014

    Debbie Strange

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