You know cows
None tattooed
Yammer and bicker
Caught around cones
Moon ash trickles, gone.
This is the original Japanese poem by Monk Ryokan:
Yo no naka wa
nani ni tatoen
yamabiko no
kotauru koe no
munashiki ga goto
And its translation by Steven D Carter :
Our life in this world –
to what shall I compare it?
Its like an echo
resounding through the mountains
and off into the empty sky.
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Wow, the Japanese poem is so beautiful. Languages are so diverse and have different stresses of syllables- in Japanese there are so many k’s, g’s, and y’s compared to English, and that’s after translating pictograms into alphabetical notation. Though the “homophobic translation” prompt focuses on similarities of look and sound and not meaning, I can’t help but wonder how different it is read in Japanese with the original words intact. Sometimes I have the urge to just learn a bunch of foreign languages.
Thanks for reading,
thebookybunhead
thebookybunhead 