May 5, 2005
Keitai Tanka, mobile phone poems
In Japan, tanka — the 31-syllable poems, like extended haiku, that have been a staple of Japanese literature for 1,300 years, is going mobile. The Times Online reports.
21-year-old Chie Kato is writing tanka. And all over the country, young people like her are doing the same.
"With three books of poetry to her name, Ms Kato is at the vanguard of what have become known as keitai tanka — “mobile phone poems” — that are written and distributed on mobiles.
There is now a weekly keitai tanka programme on national radio, a keitai tanka magazine edited by Ms Kato, and numerous websites.
Tanka students spend years mastering the use of stylised epithets called “pillow words” and use erudite literary allusions from classical literature. “Sometimes a poem can take me three or four months to refine,” says Setsuko Utsunomiya, 60, a poet from Oita. “I can't help feeling that mobile tanka are a completely different thing.”
“Compared with traditional tanka, these are not literary pieces,” Mr Inose says. “It's like the difference between a beautifully composed photograph of a landscape, and the kind of snapshot which young people take with a mobile phone camera.”
ANCIENT v MODERN
On this day in spring
When the lambent air suffuses
Soft tranquility,
Why should the cherry blossoms flutter
With unsettled hearts to earth?
— Tomonori, 9th century
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/05/008186.htm
| Tweet |
