Round-The-World Barstool Blues: HBH 120

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.; 2:46 PM, February 20, 2009
Froog said...: Younger men can still
sleep four hours and rise at 8.
Old farts snooze till noon.; 12:36 AM, February 21, 2009
Anonymous said...: Inadmissible -- not a proper haiku: no enjambment allowed.; 12:59 AM, February 21, 2009
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...; 1:30 AM, February 21, 2009
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.; 4:17 AM, February 21, 2009
Anonymous said...: 冬酌不觉晓...; 4:25 AM, February 21, 2009
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?; 6:13 AM, February 21, 2009
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."; 7:12 AM, February 21, 2009
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."; 8:15 AM, February 21, 2009

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