9: Translating Water (2008):

Matsuo Basho’s (1644–1694) old haiku is lovingly attended to in Hiroaki Sato’s book One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English (1983). Along with placing the delicate art of the word and its translation in a tangled nest of wonderful historical, philosophical, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, linguistic, and ecological contexts, Sato gathers together “one hundred frogs”: dozens and dozens of suggested translations and takes on Basho’s original work.

Already, the above citation (from Sato, 1983, p., 149) from Basho betrays the fact that the original Japanese text, which is itself already a translation of a deeply meditative, lived-experience, is herewith transliterated. Already, the betrayals of words and their ways are deep and abiding. I will leave it to others to delve this depth. All I have for pedagogical experience, here, is the weird work of teaching young children whose tongues are other-wise that, in English, you have to start at the left hand side of a word and move through it to the right in sounding it out. And this—“sounding it out”—needs to be done as a way of trying to work out a word you don’t recognize “on sight,” shall we say. As with, say, Japanese, “frog” is read by a reader “familiar” with this word, not as a string of soundable phonemes but as something recognized all at once, more like a picture seen in one glance and uttered in one sound, frog.