Haiku and the Pictograph in EL, "teeth of the snowstorm " - February  2006 -


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This is an EL (Earth Language) experimental page to enjoy
the image of a haiku/short poem originally in English/Japanese.
When you can't see the Japanese parts, please don't mind and just skip those parts.
地球語の文字や文字絵を用いて詩的表現や翻訳を試みる実験のページです。


For this month, I translated a haiku by Mika (Mihajlo Pavlovic , a Serbian lawyer)
from Haiku Harvest Vol. 5, No. 1 - Fall & Winter 2005.
Through this haiku, I recalled heavy snowstorms in February,
when I was in a rural area in northwestern Japan. Once every few years,
a three foot snowfall would occur over night. A heavy snowstorm sometimes cut
our electric line, and we couldn’t use electric heaters.
We didn’t have a fireplace, and burned candles, sticking to an oil-heater.
The flame of a candle stood straight, shrunk and waved,
making the other shades dance; and brought us various fantasies
in that isolated situation. Flames never make you go off...

今月は Haiku Harvest 5号, No. 1 - 2005年秋冬版から
セルビアのMihajlo Pavlovicさんの俳句を訳してみました。
山陰の田舎に住んでいたころ、2月には大吹雪があり、
一晩に80cmも積もることもありました。
暖炉はなくて石油ストーブと炬燵でしたが、雪で電線が切れて停電も起きました。
心細さとともにストーブにかじりついてキャンドルの炎を見つめたものです。
たった一本の炎でも伸びたり縮んだり、影を揺らせたり
見ていて飽きることがなく、いろんな幻想が浮かびました。
この俳句では、炎の動きや音を暖炉の歌と詠んでいます。
Original haiku by Mihajlo Pavlovic
teeth of the snowstorm—
fireplace song follows
a long night


The Japanese translation:
雪猛り暖炉が歌う長い夜

The Earth Language translation:



The symbols in the pictograph:
: teeth (歯), : snow (雪), : nature (自然), : flame (炎), : fireplace (暖炉)

The ideograms in the translation:
Making a visual contrast with the continuous three warm energy symbol, , I used three on the head.
(鋭いと、熱いエネルギーのひろがりを感じさせる を視覚的に対照させてみました。)
{ friction, hard): tooth (a fundamental character)(歯) (plural): teeth
(grammatical symbol): the preposition mark to show the following ideogram(s) modifies
the front word(s) or the predicate (前置符)
{ {nature, space}sky(空), { rain, solid} snow, violent}: snowstorm (吹雪)
multiple instances of (dot ) are used to indicate a pause (ポーズ)
{ {heat, spreading energy} fire (火), place}: fireplace (暖炉・囲炉裏)
{ up,}: flame(炎)
{ action, }: entertainment
“Song” in this English haiku is nice, but I took “entertain” in EL,
because of the simplicity of the ideogram-shape, fitting with “fire” together here.
: the grammatical symbol to form a d-verb: meaning that the subject becomes
in the condition shown by the following character/phrase (D動詞符)
{ same,heading}: being along, follow (vi. with ), along (preposition with ) (沿う)
{ much,{ time, space} dulation}: long (as time length), a long time (長期間)
:{ a part of the sun, other side, time}: night (夜間)

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