English Original
Mount Taihei
dreaming of no wars
under the sun
Hidenori Hiruta
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
太平山
在陽光下夢想
沒有戰爭
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
太平山
在阳光下梦想
没有战争
Bio Sketch
Hidenori Hiruta was born in 1942, when the Pacific War was going on. Since then, he has continued to seek to illumine the great matter of life and death. He finds it important to share haiku with each other. He is a leader of Haiku Group “Haiku beyond Earth.”
Timely, sociopolitically conscious, and visually and emotionally evocative Ls 2&3 not only create deep thematic resonance with L1, "Mount Taihei" (Literal Meaning: "Mount Peace") functioning as "utamakura," but also work effectively as a poetic rebuttal to the following poem and remark:
ReplyDeleteIn the world of men it came to be a time of warfare. Throughout the country -- west, east, north, and south -- there was no place where the war was not being fought. The count of those dying because of it climbed continually and reached an enormous number. It was beyond belief! And for what on earth was this struggle taking place? A most tragic state of affairs
There's no gap or break
In the rank of those marching
Under the hill:
An endless line of dying men,
Moving on and on and on ...
Buddhist monk-poet Saigyo (1118-1190 C.E.)
And Ecclesiastes 1:9:, New International Version
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is "Nothing New under the Sun."
Hidenori's fine haiku reminds me of the following remark:
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
-- Albert Camus
FYI: One of the central features of traditional Japanese poetry is the use of utamakura, a category of poetic words, often involving place names, that "cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems and within the tradition" (for more information, see Edward Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry, Yale University Press, 19970). The use of utamakura can effectively anchor the poem in a larger communal body of poetic and cultural associations, and thus broaden the significance (thematic, historical, or emotional) of the bare words in the poem...
For more examples and haiku, see "To the Lighthouse," "A Rhetorical Device, Utamakura (Poetic Place Names), accessed at https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2016/09/to-lighthouse-rhetorical-device.html