No Japanese to speak of, and I never really did get the point of syllabic meter, but I could try something in regulated verse with tonal scansion, if you like.
The MandarinTools dictionary tells me that the penultimate character can be either a noun meaning 'sleep' or an adjective meaning 'awake'. Even by the standards of Chinese, that's PFU.
And the last one can be either a noun meaning 'dawn' or a verb meaning 'know' (I suppose that might at least be using the imagery of 'enlightenment').
Would you care to disperse these clouds of ambivalence by offering a translation?
It's a riff on the first line of a famous Meng Haoran poem, a quick and ugly translation of which would be:
春眠不觉晓 I slept through the Spring night, insensate to the dawn, 处处闻啼鸟 All around me I hear singing birds. 夜来风雨声 In the night there came the sound of wind and the rain; 花落知多少 Flowers fell -- who knows how many?
My first line swaps out "Spring" and "sleep" and replaces them with "Winter" and "tipple."
Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... andnotlose it on the way home.
Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars.
[* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
9 comments:
Mid-day drinking failed.
What's twelve hours' difference?
Walk home, icy streets.
Younger men can still
sleep four hours and rise at 8.
Old farts snooze till noon.
Inadmissible -- not a proper haiku: no enjambment allowed.
It's my blog and I'll enjamb if I want to.
If you're going to be a stickler for the rules again, we really ought to be writing in Japanese.
Oh, you probably can...
No Japanese to speak of, and I never really did get the point of syllabic meter, but I could try something in regulated verse with tonal scansion, if you like.
冬酌不觉晓...
The MandarinTools dictionary tells me that the penultimate character can be either a noun meaning 'sleep' or an adjective meaning 'awake'. Even by the standards of Chinese, that's PFU.
And the last one can be either a noun meaning 'dawn' or a verb meaning 'know' (I suppose that might at least be using the imagery of 'enlightenment').
Would you care to disperse these clouds of ambivalence by offering a translation?
It's a riff on the first line of a famous Meng Haoran poem, a quick and ugly translation of which would be:
春眠不觉晓 I slept through the Spring night, insensate to the dawn,
处处闻啼鸟 All around me I hear singing birds.
夜来风雨声 In the night there came the sound of wind and the rain;
花落知多少 Flowers fell -- who knows how many?
My first line swaps out "Spring" and "sleep" and replaces them with "Winter" and "tipple."
MandarinTools says 酌 means 'pour' rather than 'sup'.
I rather like the idea of winter pouring me a good night's sleep.
Or, in the immortal words of Tom Waits: "You'd better pour me a cab, 'cos I can't drink no more."
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