Punk’s Reviews > One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English > Status Update

From a group renga, this link by Marlene Wills:

the short day
letting the cat out
letting the cat in

Ron Padgett:

"Advertising translation"

old pond
frog jumps in
plop plop fizz fizz

I read this one to my dad he said why are there two plops, and I said because of Alka-Seltzer, and he said there are two tablets but only one frog. Ohh, I said, and then told him it should have been translated as "frogs" instead because in Japanese nouns don't usually indicate number and the word for frog is also the word for frogs.

From Wm Flygare:

my mind was still
till Basho"s frog
made it ripple.

After collecting all the translations of Basho's old pond frog poem he could find, Sato then sent it to his friends and asked for their own translations and variations. I like this piece from Bernard Lionel Einbond's "Insomnia in Haiku Form":

Unable to sleep--
I imagine an old pond,
and a frog jumps in.

Alfred H. Marks translated Basho's most famous haiku into a limerick, which is an absurd thing to do and also delightful:

There once was a curious frog
Who sat by a pond on a log
And, to see what resulted,
In the pond catapulted
With a water-noise heard around the bog.

This translation from G. S. Fraser gives me strong William Shatner vibes:

The old pond, yes, and
A frog is jumping into
The water, and splash.

Finally reached the section with all the English translations of Basho's old pond frog poem and people are doing some truly terrible things to it.

Sati describes Japanese as "a language with which one can make a seemingly conclusive statement that leaves unspecified the number, gender, sentence subject, and other particulars of its components."

In his translations, Sato strives to be faithful to the original poem, which for him means the translation must come to about seventy percent of the original's syllabic count, making a poem written in the traditional 5-7-5 form twelve syllables in translation.

This poem by Ogiwara Seisensui appeals to my aesthetics and my sense of humor:

amid insects chirping insects chirp

I love it even more in Japanese because of the similar sounds and the repetition:

mushi naku naka ni mushi naku