Yorozu Tsurumi - 4 Tanka (1926)

Forgotten Poems #59

  
              —: Autumn :—

       The hills dressed in autumn fire
       Burn crimson.
       A curved leaf flutters—
       Falling.
  

  
              —: Night Wind :—

       Long thin fingers reach
       To caress
       A falling plum petal
       Under an April moon.
  

 
              —: Smoke :—

       Soft blue curves
       Melt
       Into the lily-scented air
       Where a linnet sings.
 

 
              —: Kiss :—

       A frail white blossom
       Fallen lightly
       On soft spring grass
       At twilight—
       When a peacock preens.
 

Besides this one set of tanka published in The Lyric West in 1926, Yorozu Tsurumi is a complete mystery. A web-search brings up just 4 results: a copy of The Lyric West digitised by Google, and a few of my posts on Facebook and Twitter from early last year, when I first read Yorozu’s work. A note also accompanies the poems; “Yozoru contributes English translations of a series of his own Japanese tanka. Although no attempt is made to preserve the form in the English version, they well illustrate the Japanese art of delicate pictorial contrast and elusive suggestiveness that so many English experimenters in the tanka form fail to attain.” (The Lyric West, 1926)

For his English versions of the tanka, Tsurumi uses both the classic ‘free’ cinquain form (in 5 lines), and an unrhymed ‘free’ quatrain form (in 4 lines), pioneered in English-language tanka by poets like Yone Noguchi (as early as 1897) and Jun Fujita (from 1919). There must have also been many tanka and haikai writers among the blossoming Japanese American community at this time, writing exclusively in Japanese—something which is seldom (if ever) mentioned in English-language tanka and haikai histories.

  
           3 Tanka 4 Yorozu Tsurumi
                    By Dick Whyte

                     I

       in the looped turn
       of a thrush,
       moments before
       the blue becomes
       imperceptible

                     II

       a fence      half built
       the
       hazy moon
       purpling

                     III

              mountains
       rusted green
       across the bay,

       incandescent
       arrangements of time
  

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