English Original
almond nails
pressed into brown skin
a faint perfume
of two heated bodies
touching light as petals
A Gift of Tanka, 1990
Jane Reichhold
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
杏仁色的指甲
壓入棕色的皮膚
散發出淡淡的香水味
兩個激情發熱的身體
觸摸花瓣般的光
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
杏仁色的指甲
压入棕色的皮肤
散发出淡淡的香水味
两个激情发热的身体
触摸花瓣般的光
Bio Sketch
Jane Reichhold was born as Janet Styer in 1937 in Lima , Ohio , USA . She had published over thirty books of haiku, renga, tanka, and translations. Her latest tanka book, Taking Tanka Home was translated into Japanese by Aya Yuhki. Her most popular book is Basho The Complete Haiku by Kodansha International. As founder and editor of AHA Books, Jane also published Mirrors: International Haiku Forum, Geppo, for the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, and she had co-edited with Werner Reichhold, Lynx for Linking Poets since 1992. Lynx went online in 2000 in AHApoetry.com the web site Jane started in 1995. Since 2006 she had maintained an online forum – AHAforum
This multi-sensorily evocative love-making tanka is highly cinematic, functioning like a close-up view of a couple's bodies moving slowly, gently, and with awareness, and Ls 1&2 imply that a couple belong to different races or racialized ethnicities.
ReplyDeleteWhen evaluted in its timeframe (1990s) and sociopolitical context, this tanka about an interracial relationship is physically and emotionally intimate, with a multisenroty focus on the body's evocative sensuality as expressed in each of its five lines.