Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Winter Light (Haibun)

the colored sunlight
above the wooden Jesus
men and women in black

Her casket is placed before the podium. We are asked to bow our heads and pray for God’s mercy on her. The young man to my right prays in English, the old woman to my left Cantonese.

She spoke Mandarin and understood a little English.

winter light
her wounded breasts
I remember

Now, open your bible to John 11:35, 36.

We look up from our prayers, spoken or unspoken, with tears in our eyes. The priest begins his sermon, Jesus…

snowfall
our footsteps
talk

Haibun Today, Vol. 4, No. 3.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Ghost Haiku

dark silhouettes
wander under moonlit sky ...
Ghost Festival


World Kigo Database (hungry ghosts, gaki)

Ghost Senryu

first day of Ghost Month ...
will Jesus and Buddha dwell
as my neighbors?


World Kigo Database (hungry ghosts, gaki)

Note:The seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar is regarded as Ghost Month. During the month, the gates of Heaven and Hell are opened to free the hungry spirits of the dead who then wander to seek food in the world of the living people. In order to avoid bad luck caused by ghosts or to pay homage to their deceased ancestors, the Chinese burn paper money, paper TV sets, and even paper cars and houses, and most importantly, prepare all sorts of food, to please their dead relatives or ghosts and to help them live happily in their “lifeworld.”

The Chinese view the fifteenth of the month as the most important day to give a feast to please the ghosts and also to receive blessings from their deceased relatives. It is traditionally called the Ghost Festival, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival. Fifteen days after the festival, the ghosts will return to their world and the gates will be closed again.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Short Day and Long Night: A Butterfly Cinquain

               short day
             slithering to
dark night. time keeps pushing 
    every one to sleep six feet 
                under. 
   does it matter to anyone? 
      if you stay napping in 
        the dirt? short day. 
              long night.

CANADIAN STORIES, Vol. 12, No. 67, 2009.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Lost in Translation: A Tanka Prose

a mouth stumbles
over anguished English --
words
clumsily tip
never to take flight
 

Every time I hear myself speak in English, I just hate it. It is not my human voice but rather a mechanically translated one. It is not simply that my ears hate my mouth, or that my mouth tries to irritate my ears. It is because, in the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent or vice versa, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech are lost. In the throes of translating, I feel that I'm falling out of the tightly knit fabric of emotional vocabulary into the hole-filled net of linguistic signifiers. Stuck in this dark and chaotic situation, I have become a stranger to myself, a person who lives on the edge between the world of his own and that of the foreigners he has just joined.

May 2009 issue of Word Catalyst

Monday, August 16, 2010

A Year Gone with the Wind: A Tanka Sequence

I gaze
with my shadow
at the spring moon
that used to perch
on our shared dream

I dust
out photos taken years ago
wondering
if there's a Gobi Desert
in a corner of her heart

drinking alone
under an autumn sky
in my glass
I see her moon face
of three loves ago

snowing outside
I sit at a window
drinking coffee
the old self walks into
the summer of '67


Atlas Poetica, #6

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Why Believe You Can Write Verse in English?: A Prose Poem

To write verse in English is not like growing ideograms inside your heart, reaping the sentences matured by the muse of desire, taking your clothes off with words, and exposing yourself in the rhythm of the stanzas so that you can hold your passport and cross the borders of linguistic solitudes, emigrating from the ideographic to the alphabetic.

English still remains an unmastered means of deciphering the musings of your heart and mind, and it is constantly intruded upon and twisted by inflections from the old language. Often, you are not able to connect emotions to words, to feel the weight of their syllables. Without emotional vocabulary, everything becomes elusion, confusion, and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of.

Even if you can find the right words to reflect your feelings, you are not skilled at weaving these into sentences. They simply become isolated cries clinging desperately to your heart. Even if you can find a way to weave words together into an artistic whole, the poem too often fails to conform to the texture mandated by poetry editors. Why believe you can write verse in English, whose music is not natural to you?

Broken/Breaking English: Selected Short Poems

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A Haiku about the sekiten

sekiten rite --
I see father’s face
in the mirror


Daruma Pilgrims (Confucius)

Note:“The first reference to the sekiten (a ceremony to honor Confucius and his students) in a Japanese context appears in the Shoku Nihongi, and is dated 701. The sekiten was initially held twice a year (in the second and eighth months) at the University, as mandated by the relevant section of Taiho Code. Althought imperial interest in the sekiten laspsed in the eighth century; it made a resurgence in the ninth, during a period of great enthusiasm for Chinese culture in general. The Japanese sekiten at this time was, as it had been in China (and would be again when revived by the Tokugawa bakufu), a large-scale, formal, official event,” Anne Commons, Hitomaro: Poet as God, p. 99). And Tokugawa Confucian education exerted great influence on haikai poets.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Alone by a Garden Pond

The moon meditates in the stillness
of waters. Insects and frogs hold

their breath, listening to silence.
A row of willows sways gently

in serenity. Captivated,
I find my words lost in ether.


December 2009 issue of Word Catalyst

Monday, August 2, 2010

The Tale of Two Eric Lius (Poem Sequence)

I

Where to?
Toronto.
What’s you name?
My name is Chen-ou Liu,
but you can call me Eric,
because it's easier for you to say.
Are you Chinese?
Well… kind of.
Huh?
I was born in Taiwan,
so I guess that makes me a non-Chinese Chinese.
(A blank look! Momentary silence)
I see you’re holding a Canadian passport.
So are you Chinese or Canadian?
Well, you see my skin color,
but I would rather say
I'm neither Chinese nor Canadian
because of the homes I’ve had,
the ways I’ve become.
I am Chinese-Canadian.


II

Canadian yet hyphenated,
effortlessly slipping
from “How are you?”
to “ Ma Ma Fu Fu,”
sitting in a cubicled office,
arguing with my Anglo colleagues,
after work haggling over prices
with vendors in bustling Chinatown,
watching Hockey Night in Canada
and Jackie Chan kick some ass.

Sometimes, I feel
I am a Chinese
born in Canada,
but I often proclaim
to be a Canadian
and don’t mention the Chinese part.
In a land of opportunity, I live
the double life of Eric Liu
by masking the discomfort
of being prejudged bilaterally.


Note:

1. According to classical Chinese poetics, a poem sequence is a group of poems by one poet or perhaps even by two or more poets intended to be read together in a specific order. The integrity of a poem sequence is dependent on this prescribed order of presentation. A poem sequence by a single author is sustained throughout by a single voice and point of view, and it shows consistency in style and purpose from one poem to the next. The defining characteristic of a poem sequence is that each poem must have its own value and integrity yet contribute to the artistic wholeness of the sequence while keeping the logical progression of events.

2 "Ma Ma Fu Fu” is a Chinese idiom, which literally means I'm doing OK.

December 2009 issue of Word Catalyst

The Cogito

I think,
therefore I am
free to be
a co-owner
of my mother tongue,
the fighter
for my opinions,
the judge
of my conscience,
the planner
of my destiny,
and yet locked up
in the iron cage
of the zeitgeist,
I think.


December 2009 issue of Word Catalyst