You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: How High is the Snow? :: Haiku of Japan #77
Gripping bit of biography there!
Fascinating how deep(fukasa) gets turned into high in your translation.
Your posting of the script and the phonemes enables me to sink into my own few feet of Japanese word snow! It makes for great training in listening to the rhythm of life around a single person (the poet). Very intimate stuff.
Things like that are where translation gets tricky. While we could say "how deep is the snow" in English, it would be far more natural to ask how high it is. Cases like this are when we have to abandon a literal translation and instead go with a cultural one.
I'm glad you are enjoying the original Japanese. I think most people don't care but I always post it for people like you who do care. As a haiku reader myself I know always want to see the original whenever I read a translation.