RE: Requital of a Crane (A Japanese Folktale)
That’s the haiku. I brought that up one night and my father-in-law’s eyes lit up and he couldn’t stop talking. It was great! Based on what my father-in-law had to say, Ryokan sounds like he was an interesting person.
You’re right about translation involving a lot of interpretation. The text I used for this, though, was really spare, which I think is typical of most folk tales, so I really filled it out and created scenes that I thought would make it work as a story. That’s why I wasn’t sure if translation would be accurate or not. I basically took the plot points, characters, and settings and used them as markers to write a story around. I started doing this almost two years ago and then stopped for no reason. It was nice to pick it up again.
It was indeed. I'll write a bit more about him sometime. You've got him on my mind now.
I used to do the same type of translation years ago. When I first came to Japan and was studying Japanese, I had some very basic readers that were simple elementary school level Japanese and traditional folktales. For my website at the time I would translate them to English, adding a lot more detail. That was fun.
Did you ever publish them anywhere other than your blog, or hear of anyone publishing books and/or making money from translations like this?