English Original
minus thirty
windy today again
I stay in
as loneliness descends
with the falling flakes
I’m a Traveller, 2011
Kozue Uzawa
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
零下三十度
今天又刮風
我待在家裡
伴隨著飄落的雪花
孤獨感來襲
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
零下三十度
今天又刮风
我待在家里
伴随着飘落的雪花
孤独感来袭
Bio Sketch
Kozue Uzawa is a retired university professor. She works as editor of the English tanka journal GUSTS. She composes tanka both in Japanese and English. She also translates Japanese tanka into English and co-published Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2006), and Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Shuji Terayama (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 2008). Ferris Wheel received the 2007 Donald Keene Translation Award for Japanese Literature from Columbia University.
The severe weather of Ls 1&2 works as an emotional landscape and the bone-chilling cold becomes a metaphor for loneliness, L4, whose succeeding line, L5, “with the falling flakes,” ties the internal and external worlds together effectively.
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