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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I 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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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

Oh ho ke na ki?

It is modern Japanese pronunciation. In classical literature, おほ is pronounced as a prolonged "o" (an elongated /oː/ sound).

Does that apply to longer vowels with the same(ish) sound, as in 因果応報?

Yes, and no. 報 . this is contemporary word. it pronounces "ho-o", not "ho", not "o-o", not "o". Someone read "bo-o".

In which case the "crimson carpet" appears to be the loose invention of the translator. The original just says "brocade" or I guess, "quilt", implying some sort of silk bed cover?

Try an image search with 紅葉落葉. The result will be the typical image a Japanese person imagines when hearing 散り紅葉. Then try the same search with "crimson carpet." From the standpoint of literary and artistic sensibility, the difference is not small.

my imagination when reading 散り紅葉 is an enka song lol

You hit the point. Image from enka will be nearly identical to ones from poem.

>> I really wish they'd cite the original Japanese.

Given the Japanese above, translate.google can do text to speech[1], and goog AIMode[3] and bing/chat[2][4] can give multiple translations with notes.

But finding that Japanese, given only the TFA's description? I only saw AIMode manage that, not vanilla search. Perhaps using the author's Japanese wikipedia page[5], or perhaps here, or?

[1] https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E3%81%8A%E... [2] https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/JcJSRgDDvT84M16x7RJDb [3] https://share.google/aimode/FNEXZGRPFPANlvNwd [4] https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/wjaWnGHNpGs18X4M6CJV6 [5] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%99%9A%E7%99%BD

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...

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