alt Hacker NewsI only know a tiny corner of the language, but for things like this I really wish they'd cite the original Japanese. Precisely because the haiku is a constrained form, it is also an opportunity for ambiguity, double-meaning, and cases where a word may be translated with the same semantics but different connotations.
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.
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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...
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