Japanese Death Poems (opens in new tab)

I am a native Japanese

Original Kanji - hiragana works: おほけなき床の錦や散り紅葉

How it sounds: Oh ke naki Yukano nishikiya chiri ko yo

Agree 10,000 fold. English and Japanese are so different and have such different standards of aesthetics and literary form that good translations are like independent creations inspired by the original. I would like to know that the original form was. Even a word by word ungrammatical transliteration would be helpful. But not to have the Japanese available means I cannot even look it up...

This is the general problem with literature and poetry especially. They're not entirely translatable.

- Languages are part of culture and they are historically conditioned, making them necessarily bounded and finite [0]. While the essential thing signified may be the same for corresponding words in two languages (snow vs. Schnee), there is variance in semantic emphasis, connotation, and symbolic significance. In other words, the pragmatic aspect of language is highly contextual and conditioned.

- Words can be used univocally, equivocally, or analogically, and there isn't necessarily a correspondence between these constellations across any two languages. But so much of wordplay trades on such constellations.

- The syntactic and phonetic features peculiar to a language - apart from the what is signified per se - is heavily exploited by poetry.

[0] This reminds me of words like the Greek λόγος (logos), which does not find a satisfactory counterpart in any language as far as I can tell. (Approximations are Tao, Ṛta, or Ma'at, for instance.) You see this difficulty in the translation of John 1 where it is usually rendered verbum or word, which have their own perfections, but fail to do justice to the richness of the original meaning of Logos in passages like John 1:1 and 1:3: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [...] All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made." When you substitute "Word" with "Logos", you can clearly see how much more pregnant that message is, e.g., that, contrary to the pagan mythology of those John was addressing, in the beginning there was order, not chaos; that God is Reason; that everything that exists is caused by God and therefore fundamentally intelligible. (Curiously, the Latin Verbum is better than the Greek at emphasizing the procession of divine Reason as Second Person from the First Person in the Trinity.)

I feel like trying to replicate the meter in English is a silly constraint

I would prefer to know how each line would be best interpreted if it weren't a haiku

Sound and intonation are never going to translate between Japanese and English. It's not even on the table.

Such things can't even necessarily translate well between two languages as similar as French and English. Japanese and English is completely hopeless.

It's true in the other direction too, though this being an English site it might be more easily neglected. I've seen some English songs translated into Japanese, keeping the same syllable count scheme. The Japanese is radically simplified compared to the English, with entire adverbs, adjectives, even clauses removed. And that's even before we ask whether Japanese necessarily has the correct words to translate some of the richer English concepts with their own centuries of history and connotation behind them that these songs contained.

It is what it is. There isn't much that can be done about it. Even if someone made an exhaustive translation of something, it could never be repacked into something that matches the original concise packing.

As a native speaker, would there be any way that you could translate this back one poem back into Japanese? I am curious what the original would be, and if the translation was truly accurate. It was favorite one from the article:

RAIZAN (来山) Died on the 3rd day of the 10th month, 1716 at the age of 63

Farewell, sire—

like snow, from water come

to water gone.

I was reminded of the writer Pico Iyer's beautiful writing in Aflame: Learning from Silence of exactly this sentiment, after his house burned down [1]

`My house burnt down

I can now see better

The rising moon`

[1] https://www.mariashriversundaypaper.com/pico-iyers-fire-grie...

"when my house burned down, I gained an unobstructed view of the sky"

A different translation of the same

Wow, I wonder what I would say if I had no choice but to accept dying

Maybe just one word F

Makes me think of that infinite improbability drive scene 2005, these people reach the end of their maze, life path

such a good tune

"Passing wind" is an English euphemism, the original does not use "kaze" (wind) but goes straight for "he" (fart).

The original word order also puts the dream at the start and drops fart right at the end, which I think is funnier than putting it on the first line.

Passing wind is another term (among many others) for farting.

I don't know whether there is a specific japanese cultural explanation, but in general it often was. In winter when it was cold, those who lacked the strength to go on, layed down in the snow to rest forever.

spirits travel to rest in the mountains after death. the mountain is a place between life and death. there is much association between mountains and death. then by extension snow