English Original
afloat out of body
the lightness
of Chagall’s blue night
Randy Brooks
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
漂浮在肉體之外
夏卡爾的藍色之夜
的輕盈
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
漂浮在肉体之外
夏卡尔的蓝色之夜
的轻盈
Bio Sketch
Dr. Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University where he teaches courses on haiku and tanka. He and his wife, Shirley Brooks, are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent publication is HAIKU DECK, with 52 haiku or senryu on 52 cards.
This haiku’s real achievement is that it doesn’t merely tell readers that the narrator feels weightless; it finds an artistic world in which weightlessness seems entirely natural.
ReplyDeleteIts three lines offer a progression rather than a complete explanatory statement:
L 1: A state of being.
The opening phrase, “afloat out of body,” is unexpected yet compelling. “Afloat” suggests buoyancy, weightlessness, and suspension, while “out of body” shifts the physical sensation toward something psychological, even spiritual. Although the two expressions overlap in meaning, they are not redundant. Together, they establish a state of being between the physical and the dreamlike.
L 2: A sensation.
“Lightness” is the poem’s hinge. Its isolated position gives the word room to breathe. It also delays the completion of the thought, creating a moment of suspension that formally enacts the sensation the poem describes.
L 3: An imaginative source for that sensation.
The closing phrase, “of Chagall’s blue night,” is the haiku’s strongest and most distinctive element. The reference to Marc Chagall evokes an entire visual and emotional world: floating lovers, dreamlike figures, deep blue skies, and the suspension of ordinary physical laws. The haiku doesn’t need to describe any of these elements explicitly. The allusion does the work, allowing the reader’s familiarity with Chagall’s art to complete the image.
There is also a lovely tension between “out of body” and “Chagall’s blue night.” The first suggests an experience arising within the narrator, while the second gives that experience an external, visual form. The result is a subtle fusion of inner sensation and artistic imagination: the narrator doesn’t simply feel weightless but seems to inhabit a world in which such weightlessness belongs.