Thursday, February 21, 2008

witnessed at a dinner table:

the setting: a round table at victoria street food market
those present: yvonne, huiying, kok leong, ln, edmund, john and me
the topic: hokkien phrases and haiku

the story so far:

we were talking about hokkien "idioms" as introduced by ln. for eg, swee swee bo zhao zui - literally means something is done/made so well, so solid that it can hold water, figuritively it means something is perfect. pattern zuay guay badminton - we all know that there are a lot of different strokes in badminton liek the lob, the forehand and backhand smash, the lift, the drop etc etc so if someone pattern zuay guay badminton, he/she has even more patterns than a badminton match. meaning, he/she has plenty of tricks up his/her sleeve.

suddenly in the midst of our cultured talk about hokkien phrases, john popped up with the subject of haiku, a kind of japanese poetry. and so it goes (something like this)........


john: eh like haiku, is count by syllabus rite?
LN: yeah, think it's like 5-7-5
someone: ehhh like pattern zuay guay badminton is 7 syllabus!
jiahui: ya ya, so it can be like the middle sentence of a haiku.
(someone started counting)
john: eh ya hor! got 5 syllabus one or not?
jiahui: got... swee swee bo zhao zui!!
john: ya hor! somemore somemore?
ln: ok.. swee swee bo zhao zui, pattern zuay guay badminton..... song song gao jurong!!
ln: HAIKU!!

whole table erupts in laughter.. so there we have it my friends - haiku, hokkien style:

swee swee bo zhao zui
pattern zuay guay badminton
song song gao jurong

for the hokkien-uninclined, here's a literal translation:
nice nice no leak water
pattern more than badminton
happy happy reach jurong

not much sense, is there? well i believe we call it abstract, which is exactly what a haiku embodies. HAHA!!


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