The frog haiku from Basho was written in the 1600s - and it's reach has spread around the world. There are hundreds of translations of this brief three-line Japanese work of art. A famous translation hails from Lafcadio Hearn, who lived from 1850 to 1904.
Here is that version.
Old pond
frogs jumped in
sound of water.
It is always challenging to move something artistic from one language to another. Imagine your favorite song - what if they tried to make it into a story? Would it lose something because the melody and voices were no longer there? Would it be better, worse, or just different?
The same is true here. In Japanese the third line is "mizu no oto" - which is really something like "splash" or "ker-plunk!" - it's a sound noise. So how do you translate what in one language is a sound-noise to another language? Does it have the same feeling? "Splosh"? "Splish"?
Words that have a certain "feel" in one language might not have that same feel in another language. If in English we hear "canary" we might imagine the yellow bird - but we might also get the sense of "canary in a coal mine" which has very particular feelings associated with it. Someone hearing the same word in Spanish might not have that other set of emotions.
What do you think about this froggie poem?
July - A Poem A Day
A Poem A Day - main page
