Thanks to Bob Hass, I'm
reading the haiku masters
of Japan -- Basho,
Buson and Issa --
in one essential book: The
Essential Haiku,
published by Ecco,
with smart intro and useful
notes by Mr. Hass.
Examples follow.
(Translators do not observe
strict syllabic count).
Here is Basho as
rendered by B. Watson in
fifteen syllables:
"It's not like anything
they compare it to --
the summer moon."
And now for Buson,
trans. by Yuki Sawa and
Edith M. Shiffert:
"I go,
you stay;
two autumns."
Issa, the last of
the three, wrote the following
(trans. Robert Huey):
"Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants."
This post, which went up
ten years ago, concluded
with my rules-be-damned
three-word translation
of Basho’s famous beloved
haiku of the frog:
Pond.
Frog.
Splash.
This might be a bit more Japanese:
Pond
Splash
Frog
Posted by: Mark C Minton | February 21, 2021 at 01:59 AM
By the way, the order in the previous note is not original with me. The brevity is yours, the the order of items is Kenneth Rexroth's sequence in his translation, which I believe is inferior to your striking parataxis!
Posted by: Mark C Minton | February 21, 2021 at 02:12 AM
Thank you, Mark. I see what you mean. And I appreciate the compliment!
Posted by: David Lehman | February 21, 2021 at 02:17 PM
Thanks,David. The reason I worried this small point is that the second half of the haiku is very ambiguous in Japanese. The first item in the sequence referring to the "old pond" is followed by the "cutting phrase" "ya," which separates it as an object from the remainder of the haiku. The second half is meant to be read as one flowing unit -- frog jumping and water sounding. Basho chose to express this grammatically in a way so that the leaping frog modifies the water sound. So, it is literally something like "frog-leaping water sound." So, in English word order this would conventionally lead to putting the frog last in the sequence, such as "the sound of water made by a frog leaping into it" But this is pedestrian, awkward and not mysterious in any way. The manner in which Basho did this, however,creates a "which came first, chicken or egg?" feeling, fusing
the splash and the leaping frog into a single phenomenon. This is reinforced because Basho places no cutting phrase "ya" between the mention of the leaping frog and the water sound. Thus, he enacts what haiku is made for: like a koan, a bit of cognitive confusion provoking thoughts about the true nature of perception. Seems to me the sequence I suggested -- Pond,Splash, Frog-- best recreates this authorial intention in English.
Best, Mark
Posted by: Mark C Minton | February 22, 2021 at 05:22 PM