English Original
Midnight;
Over the lifeless sand plain,
The moon and I
Are Alone.
Tanka: Poems in Exile, 1923
Jun Fujita
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
午夜;
在死氣沉沉的沙原上，
月亮和我
形單影隻。
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
午夜;
在死氣沉沉的沙原上，
月亮和我
形單影隻。
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.
This visually and emotionally poignant loneliness tanka reads more like the poetic rendering of an extreme long shot (functioning as an establishing shot) in a Western-esque film. And its tone and mood is greatly enhanced by the symbolically rich and psychologically effective midnight landscape described in L2.
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