Poetry
A Handful of Sand
一握の砂
Ishikawa Takuboku · 1910
Opening lines
東海の小島の磯の白砂に
われ泣きぬれて
蟹とたはむる
On the white sand of the shore of a small island in the Eastern Sea
I, drenched in tears,
play with a crab
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from aozora.gr.jp
Synopsis
Five hundred and fifty-one tanka, in a lively language far removed from the usages of the genre according to the Encyclopædia Britannica. The Poetry Foundation reads in them intellectual, ironic and intimate poems, and the publisher Shinchōsha's presentation a lyricism in which the poet pities himself, against a background of poverty and loneliness. It is its author's first tanka collection, the one that made him popular, according to the National Diet Library.
Context
The collection was published in 1910 by the publisher Shinonome-dō, and the National Diet Library dates from this book the public's favour for its author, whom the poet Yosano Tekkan had encouraged as early as 1902 by welcoming him into the magazine Myōjō. An American reference database counts these poems among the best-known and best-loved tanka of modern Japanese literature. Each poem is broken into three lines, a layout that the Nipponica encyclopaedia calls distinctive, and that an article from the Kōdansha group also describes.
Who it is for
Very short poems, to be read one by one and in any order, for those who want to discover the modern tanka.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French by Yves-Marie Allioux in 2016, after several selections of the author's poems published by Arfuyen.
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