English Original
Among the brittled grasses,
Frosting in the moon glare,
Tombstones are
Whiter tonight.
Tanka: Poems in Exile, 1923
Jun Fujita
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
在枯萎的草叢中,
和月光下結霜,
一排排墓碑
今晚看起來更白.
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
在枯萎的草丛中,
和月光下结霜,
一排排墓碑
今晚看起来更白.
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.
Fujita's tanka effectively depicts, line by line, a visually and emotionally gloomy graveyard scene, and "whiter" in the last line not only enhances the emotional impact of this graveyard tanka, but also indicates the N's state of mood/mind.
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