Now that my storehouse
  has burned down, nothing
  conceals the moon.

  Ever since my house burnt down,
  I see the moon more clearly

In the original, the image of a dream is combined with the cruder image of passing wind.."

Is the wind representing the fart here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph?useskin=vector

By comparison, the gold standard for dealing with non-English poetry in English: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...

You have (1) the original Greek, (2) word-by-word lookup, (3) translation notes, and (4) multiple translations.

I am circling my prey

If I am strong, the world will finally let us be

https://pearlharbor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/USS-Essex...

the dead alone know peace.

Life is but melting snow.

~~

Having a mental illness and being homeless I sit with my life now and let it melt. I know death is coming so I just let it come. I tried to force death to come twice, but I found that suffering is really no different that joy.

I live in a van right now so I am upper class homeless but soon I may be totally shelterless. Part of me is looking forward to it. Through the last ten years, moving from riches to rags, all my past attachments, all I can do is laugh at myself. There is such a weird liberation in inescapable suffering and I hope you all get to experience it someday.

The original Japanese of the first poem is:

おほけなき床の錦や散り紅葉

The translation on the site:

> I am not worthy > of this crimson carpet: > autumn maple leaves.

This contains the translator's interpretation, and the sound and intonation are completely lost. I admire the translator's effort, but I want visitors to understand how much this differs from the original.

    Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray,
    soon enough the seas will sink your little island.
    So while there is still the illusion of time,
    set out for another shore.
    No sense packing a bag.
    You won’t be able to lift it into your boat.
    Give away all your collections.
    Take only new seeds and an old stick.
    Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail.
    Don’t be afraid.
    Someone knows you’re coming.
    An extra fish has been salted.

from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski

are mere delusion—

death is death."

Hardcore

written word austerity;

Death, captured in time

`My house burnt down

I can now see better

The rising moon`

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

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.

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

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

- 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.)

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 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.

A different translation of the same