Friday, February 20, 2009

HBH 120

Night usurps the day,
Stealing half of tomorrow.
Four in the morning.


Yes, it happened again. Yes, I blame The Weeble.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mid-day drinking failed.
What's twelve hours' difference?
Walk home, icy streets.

Froog said...

Younger men can still
sleep four hours and rise at 8.
Old farts snooze till noon.

Anonymous said...

Inadmissible -- not a proper haiku: no enjambment allowed.

Froog said...

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...

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

冬酌不觉晓...

Froog said...

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?

Anonymous said...

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."

Froog said...

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."