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

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Another Pnin: A Haibun

I hate hearing myself speaking English. My voice sounds inhuman... mechanical. In the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech are lost. I feel that I'm falling out of the tightly knit fabric of emotional vocabulary into a hole-filled net of linguistic signifiers.

April snow...
not a word passes over
my tongue

Contemporary Haibun Online, 7:3, October 2011;
Anthologized in Contemporary Haibun, 13, 2012
World Haibun Anthology