Rec: Meta About Translating Japanese Poetry @ POETREE

[jjhunter]

Meta: translating Japanese by lhhammer @ poetree

Aside from the usual translation problem of how words do not match one-to-one across languages, but rather overlap in meaning and tenor and connotation, the biggest difficulty with Japanese is that it's what linguists call a pro-drop language. That is, any information that a listener can understand from context can and usually will be omitted. The attitude is something like, If you have enough context to understand who a pronoun refers to, why bother with the pronoun? In everyday conversation or an extended prose passage, this generally isn't hard to deal with as there's a lot of context, but in a short, detached poem, the lacunae can be hard to fill, leaving you to ponder whether a verb describes the action of "I," "you," "us," or some other person or people.

==

Also, for those who missed goneahead's fabulous week as POETREE Host focusing on 'International Poetry' earlier this month, alee_grrl has put together an excellent roundup post.