Sound of Water

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Sound of Water (mizu no oto)

***** Location: Japan
***** Season: Non-seasonal Topic
***** Category: Earth

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Explanation

mizu no oto 水の音

ever since Basho wrote his famous haiku and it has been translated into other languages, this formulation has fascinated haiku poets worldwide.

Let us look at some of the problems involved with it.

Just googeling with "mizu no oto" and "haiku" gives more than 16.400 hits, in June 2006. So it is an important topic.

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古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

........................... in normal Japanese

furui ike ga arimasu
kawazu ga tobikomu to
mizu no oto ga kikoemasu


(when) the frog jumped in
(I heared) the sound of water ...
(that made me remember, I was sitting by)
the old pond

Cause and Effect .. and the CUT MARKER
Gabi Greve


When I read this, I see a description of a simple situation, which I can experience here in my rural Japan every day now in May, since the frogs are out and active ...

whether Basho lived through this situation as a personal experience
or
imagined the whole situation ... I do not know.
And the haiku itself does not give me a hint to answer this.


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old pond — frogs jumpes in — sound of water

Translated by Lafcadio Hearn

FROG, kaeru, kawazu as a kigo

One Hundred Frogs, a translators nightmare ...


http://www.haiku-plus.de/englisch/haiku-e.html

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Direct translation (chokuyaku) :

mizu no oto ... (the, a) sound of water

grammatical chokuyaku :

mizu no ... of water
oto ... a sound ... of water the sound ... the sound of water


bad chokuyaku example :

mizu .. water
no .. of
oto .. sound ... > water of sound


since there is no THE or A in Japanese, it does not mean we can do without in English. Since there is no plural in Japanese, it does not mean everything is to be translated as singular.

or consider it this way:

the sound of water ... chokuyaku this to Japanese..
?? oto no mizu ? certianly not !

Discussion of direct translations
Translating Haiku Forum

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old pond . . .
frog leaps into
water’s sound

old pond . . .
a frog leaps in
water’s sound

© William J. Higginson, Haiku by the Numbers. An Essay.

Here I feel like asking, does the frog jump into the sound?
Is there a sound before the frog jumps?

Re-arrangeing the original Japanese, I start again:

Furuike ga arimasu.
Kawazu ga tobikomu to mizu no oto o kikoemasu.

There is an old pond.
As the frog/the frogs jump/leap/plunge in,
I/we hear the sound/the noise of the water.

These are the facts. How to state them short, but poetically?

an old pond -
the sound of water
when the frogs jump in

This is the situation in my rural Japan, where the frogs are never alone, but with the extended family of a few hundred. All start quaaaking at a certain point, then shut up again, then quaaaaking again. And suddenly, they all leap into the irrigation pond.


Look at some of my FROG haiku,
edited by KAWAZU himself !!!


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You can also find this spelling:

In attempt to imitate the one line of a Japanese haiku:

furuikeyakawazutobikomumizunooto

... this is of course nonsense. So is this:

FURUIKEYA KAWAZUTOBIKOMU MIZUNOOTO

mizunooto > mizunoo to

Mizunoo, Mizu no O, he was an emperor of Japan ! 後水尾天皇

Spelling Japanese, the Hepburn System

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Water of Sound, a problem

You can also google for this translation in the internet

Old pond!
frog jumps in
water of sound.


water of sound ... well ...

For many of us, an absolute indicator of a haiku is a break or caesura either at the end of the first or second line.

old pond
a frog leaps into
the water of sound

http://www.ahapoetry.com/haidefjr.htm
www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm

... ...

a translation done word by word from the Japanese original. In the phrase "water of sound" you get to see the form of post position in Japanese which is an inversion of what we call in English pre position or preposition. In his commentary that follows each poem, because of the three forms he is able to discuss the various multiple meanings of each Japanese word and allow the non-Japanese reader to enter the world of Basho in a way that would else not be possible.

Some English reader called reading a book of haiku like "being pecked to death by doves." Said reader felt attacked by the short choppy verses and was apparently not able to get into the spirit of play that the authors infused their verses with.
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/azwrvw.htm

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Jumping into the Sound, a problem

Compiled by Larry Bole

Here is an interesting footnote to an essay, "The State of Modern Japanese Literature," by Okuizumi Hikaru (which appeared in "Japanese Book News Number 46"):

"In a book published this year titled 'Furuike ni kawazu wa tobikonda ka' [Did the Frog Jump into the Pond?] (Kashinsha, 2005), the contemporary haiku poet Hasegawa Kai puts forward the new hypothesis that the frog did not, in fact, leap into the water."
http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/publish_j/jbn/pdf/jbn46.pdf.

For those interested, at this year's Haiku North America 2007, taking place from Wednesday, August 15, to Sunday, August 19, in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, Dr. Richard Gilbert will be giving the following presentation:

Did the Frog Jump Into the Old Pond?
A presentation by Dr. Richard Gilbert. Several literary and cultural elements of haiku which Basho instituted are now just beginning to come to light, as Hasegawa Kai discusses, in "Did the Frog Jump Into the Old Pond?" (furuike ni kawazu wa tobi konda ka, 2005).

Matsuo Basho­ created a hokku style which introduced radically disjunctive acts of "cutting through" realism in order to express consciousness. Yet due to an overemphasis on the direct image and other factors, Basho­'s achievement lies partially concealed, in Japan and elsewhere. As Hasegawa's work has not been made available in English, his freshly creative insight
provides enticing bridges to shared and deepened understanding.
http://www.haikunorthamerica.com/hna_2007_events.html


From the UVa Library Etext Center: Japanese Text Initiative:

"The frog in the old pond appearing in a famous Bashoo's haiku is a "king frog", or a "ground frog" , which has a tendency to hastily jump into the water when it
hears footsteps."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/haiku/long.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes&entryid=kawazu


Found at answers.com (apparently borrowed from the Wikipedia article on Basho):

"In early 1686 he composed one of his best-remembered hokku:

furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
the old pond / a frog jumps in-- / water's sound [1686]

Apparently this poem became instantly famous: by April the poets of Edo gathered at the Basho Hut for a haikai no renga contest on the subject of frogs that seems to have been a tribute to Basho's hokku, which was placed at the top of the compilation."
http://www.answers.com/topic/matsuo-bash-1


A reference to a partial German translation, from an essay, "Ecstasy of the Moment and the Depth of Time," by Dusan Pajin (Yugoslavia):

"We leave aside the point noted by [Raoul] Hausmann (1963), who translated the last stanza [sic] as "vertieft das Schweigen" (deepening the silence)."

Ein uralter Weiher:
Der Sprung des Frosches
Vertieft das Schweigen.

Der alte Weiher:
Ein Frosch, der grad hineinspringt -
Des Wassers Platschen ...

http://www.tempslibres.org/aozora/en/hart/hart10.html


A few thoughts of my own: some translators translate "furuike" as "quiet pond." I think this makes the haiku too two-dimensional, focusing solely on the silence/sound dichotomy.

And then there is the question of whether it is one frog jumping or many. Most translators into English, and the few Japanese commentaries I have seen translated into English, tend to make it out to be one frog. But others have said that in real life, there would be more than one frog.

I say how about both one and many, as the haiku poet Wakyu suggests:

hitotsu tobu oto ni mina tobu kawazu kana

At the sound of one jumping in,
All the frogs
Jumped in.

trans. Blyth


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Quote from Straw Hat, by Tateo Fukutomi

Why, then, do so many translators of haiku feel that they have carte blanche privileges vis-à-vis the ordering of words and the images evoked by them? Of course, slavishly literal translations are inadvisable, since, to cite just one structural difference between Japanese and English, the Japanese equivalent of “of” (no) is postpositional, coming after a noun or noun phrase, whereas
the English “of,” as we all remember from elementary school, is prepositional. Mizu no oto or, literally, “water of sound,” idiomatically translates as “sound of water,” or even better, as Alan Watts rendered Bashô’s famous use of the phrase: “plop ! ”

In my view, a poet of haiku — or any poet, for that matter — has his or her pretty good reasons for beginning with Image A and ending with Image B. Bashô could have easily written: “Sound of water — the frog jumps in the old pond” ... but he didn’t. He chose, of course, to cap this particular haiku with mizu no oto (Watts’s “plop !”), following the image of the old pond, not preced- ing it.

If a haiku is a little journey of mind and spirit from an old pond to a frog’s splash in the water, the translator who capriciously turns this around is writing a completely different poem, and a bad one at that. Matters order image!

David Lanoue
http://www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/Fukutomi2005.html

ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo

A frog jumped into an old pond of mossy water making a little sound. The momentary action and the lingering sound remind us of the wonder of a moment and eternity.

Into the old pond
a frog jumped
with a splash

- translated by Kimiyo Tanaka

Until quite recently I just translated like above, but I have realized that as Basho said in this haiku,"furuike ya", "furuike"is "pond" and "ya" is a Japanese cutting word, I should not have translated "into the old pond", but I should cut after the old pond. BesidesBasho did not actually see a pond, he saw an old pond in his mind.
So I would like to change my translation. I am not sure whether some other poets translated like this or not....

The Pleasure of Haiku, by Kimiyo Tanaka

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furuike / ya / kawazu / tobikomu / mizu / no / oto
old-pond / : / frog / jump-in / water / 's / sound
http://billknott.typepad.com/billknott/2006/05/mizu_no_oto_som.html


Matsuo Basho's Frog Haiku (30 translations)

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Quoting Larry Bole

Regarding Basho's frog: there certainly has been a lot of interpretive commentary written about it. It doesn't appear that there are any "simple answers."

Nevertheless, Shiki wrote an essay about Basho's frog, which has been translated by Blyth in "A History of Haiku," Vol. 2, (Fourth Printing, 1971), pp. 46-76, in which Shiki says:

...a visitor ... said to me, "This verse is called a masterpiece, known even by uneducated people such as pack-horse men and servantmen, yet no one can explain the meaning." As he wanted me to explain it, I answered, "The meaning of this verse is just what is said; it has no other, no special meaning. ... it only means that he heard the sound of a frog jumping into an old pond - nothing should be added to that.

If you add anything to it, it is not the real nature of the verse. Clearly and simply, not hiding, not covering; no thinking, no technique of words, - this is the characteristic of the verse. Nothing else."


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Quote from G. Blankestijn

Kiyosumi Garden Pond


Haiku Memorial Stone

Those fish ponds of course do not exist anymore, but there is a large pond in the Kiyosumi Gardens not far from the Basho Museum. Not surprisingly, one of the three frog-and-pond haiku stones stands right in this garden. In the expectation that this pond will help me to evoke the proper atmosphere I proceed to the Kiyosumi Gardens.

Basho wrote the frog haiku in 1686. The circumstances under which this took place were recorded by his disciple Kagami Shiko (1665-1731), in Kuzu no Matsubara ('Pine Forest of Kuzu,' 1692), a book written to elucidate Basho's idea of haikai.

Basho was sitting in his riverside hut. It was spring. A soft drizzle fell and the smell of blossoms was in the air. Mountain roses were blooming at the edge of a pond in the garden. Enomoto Kikaku (1661-1707) kept Basho company, but master and disciple were both sitting quietly. Suddenly a frog jumped into the old pond, breaking the stillness with a watery plop. In Basho's mind, two phrases formed, the last part of a hokku:

a frog jumps in
sound of water

Kikaku suggested yamabuki ya, 'mountain roses' for the first five syllables. In traditional poetry, this plant was associated with frogs. Basho pondered for a while and then decided to use instead a phrase uncommon in poetry: 'the old pond,' furu ike ya. This was a nice literary twist which added 'newness' and 'lightness' to the poem. It was also the utmost of simplicity.

Basho's frog was an experimental one. It was the first silent frog in Japanese poetry, which so far had been regaled with quaking choruses. Instead of this night music, Basho's frog exits with a soft plop, after which rings of water expand and die out. It is a bit lonely, just like Basho.

By the way, the frog can also be plural, as the Japanese language normally does not make numerical distinctions. But to have a whole army of frogs jump into the pond seems just too noisy. It does not fit the atmosphere of the poem, which is one of yugen, of stillness, symbolized in the pond that after all is an ancient one. This is something almost all translators agree on.

The mizo no oto or 'sound of water' is another matter. Many translators cannot resist the temptation to enliven this phrase by translating it as 'Plop,' 'Splash,' or even 'Kdang.' That is strictly speaking not correct, for Basho himself could also have used an onomatopoeic word. The Japanese language is very rich in them, more so than English, but Basho purposefully selected 'sound of water,' perhaps to emphasize the progression from stillness (no sound) to movement (sound) to stillness again.

Zen-master and graphic artist Sengai (1751-1837) wrote a parody of the frog haiku (yes, already in Edo-times it was so popular that it invited parodies!) in which he creates a comic effect by using the onomatopoeic pon to, resulting in a very different poem:

old pond
something plop
jumped in

furuike ya naniyara pon to tobikonda

Copyright © 2003-2006 Ad G. Blankestijn,
Japan. All rights reserved.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~daikoku/haiku/meguri/kuhi-2.htm

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A Contrarian View on Basho's Frog Haiku

Now, why do I say that Basho's frog haiku is one of the most misunderstood haiku poems? Possible misunderstandings about this haiku include:

We seldom see in Japan a single frog, rather many of them around a pond, rice paddies or any other similar places in spring time as it is the season for their mating. They are noisy and in abundance. Why should it then, be a single frog and not a number of, or many frogs?

©　Susumu Takiguchi


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Worldwide use

India



breeze leads on
the endless sunny path ~
sound of a stream

Quoted from Wonderhaikworlds: Lux and Narayanan

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Things found on the way

Here is a collage made by 5 year olds at Newton Aycliffe Primary School.



It came from them after me telling the story of Basho and showing them his frog poem.

We started with it in Japanese - then i told them that there were many different translations and shared a few.

Then asked them to come up with their version - and it mirrors many versions that children come up with.

Paul Conneally, July 2006

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HAIKU

wondering what it
would be like to jump into
the sound of water?

Robert Wilson

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Kare eda ni/ Karasu no tomari/ Mizu no oto

Ancient pond
A frog leaps in
The sound of the water
(Tr. Donald Keene)

http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/arts/new-age-fiction/satori.asp
I hope this is just a wrong quote. The third line should be : aki no kure

on a withered branch a crow has settled - autumn evening

ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo


© Haiga by Shane Gilreath, July 2006

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old pond
if basho was here
i'd jump in to!

anonymous (let me know the author !!!)



.... What is the sound
.... of one frog jumping?
.... [haiku]

<><><> Chibi

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In my rural Japan, there are many frogs jumping the old irrigation ponds in the season when the paddies are filled with water, like now in May.

For the sake of argument, let us see the pond as my mind/soul/heart, the frogs as worldly desires, illusions, delusions (bonno), then we get


my quiet meditating mind -
as desires arise (jump in),
the sounds of the world unfold



Terraced Rice Paddies in my Valley



a thousand old ponds -
a million frogs jumping -
a billion echoes

Gabi Greve, May 2007


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Related words


One Hundred Frogs ... the story continues


***** Matsuo Basho and his memorial day, Basho-Ki　
松尾芭蕉　と 芭蕉忌　

kigo for early winter


***** . Pond, little lake (ike 池) ...
kigo for various seasons 　


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