English Original
Huckleberry Finn
a violet pressed inside
when I was someone else
NeverEnding Story, April 23, 2026
Joshua St. Claire
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
哈克貝利費恩
一朵紫羅蘭壓在書本裡面
當時我假裝成另一個人
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
哈克贝利费恩
一朵紫罗兰压在书本里面
当时我假装成另一个人
Bio Sketch
Joshua St. Claire is an accounant from rural Pennsylvania, USA. His haiku have been published broadly in journals, have appeared in several annual anthologies, and have received several awards. His favorite topic to write about is the sky.
L1 of the haiku, "Huckleberry Finn," alludes to the protagonist of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American writer, Mark Twain. This reference immediately evokes themes of escape, moral conflict, and the formation of identity.
ReplyDeleteThere is a poignant imaginative leap between this literary figure in L1 and the image in Ls 2&3: “a violet pressed inside / when I was someone else.” The pressed violet—often associated with modesty, secrecy, or memory—suggests something delicate and preserved, yet removed from the vitality of lived experience. Like a flower flattened between pages, the speaker’s former self is intact but no longer alive in the present. The book becomes both a literal and symbolic container of memory.
This connection gains depth when considered alongside Huck’s journey. In the novel, Huck flees his abusive father and fakes his own death in order to seek freedom along the Mississippi River. Traveling with Jim, an enslaved man, he wrestles with what he calls a “deformed conscience,” torn between the values imposed by society and his own emerging sense of empathy and justice. This inner conflict produces a fractured identity, as Huck must decide who he is apart from what he has been taught to be.
Read through this lens, the pressed violet becomes a subtle analogue for these earlier selves—whether Huck’s or the speaker’s—preserved but outgrown. Just as Huck ultimately rejects the “civilizing” forces that seek to define him, the speaker recognizes a distance between their present identity and the person who once encountered this story. The haiku thus captures the bittersweet realization that revisiting a formative text is also a confrontation with one’s own past self, now fixed in memory like a flower between pages.