Discussion: translating Bashō’s “old pond” haiku across media

[Denys Rzhavskyi]

Dear PMJS colleagues,

I would like to invite discussion around a small practice-based
experiment in cross-media translation using Matsuo Bashō’s “old pond”
haiku as a case study.

Most translation of haiku still moves from one verbal language into
another. My question is narrower: what happens when the destination
medium is electronic sound and moving image rather than another text?

In developing the audiovisual work I BASHO, I treated features
commonly discussed in relation to haiku poetics — including cut,
interval, temporal compression, resonance, and the relation between
event and aftermath — as compositional problems rather than as
elements to be illustrated literally.

The experiment quickly exposes the limits of analogy. A musical
interruption is not automatically equivalent to kire; silence is not
simply ma; repetition may actively work against the singularity of the
poem’s event. For me, that failure of equivalence is the interesting
part.

I would be especially interested in views from scholars of premodern
Japanese literature on where this kind of cross-media comparison
becomes analytically useful, and where it starts to distort the poem
by importing concepts from contemporary audiovisual practice.

A public viewing copy of the work is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWwzCzwcHgs

I am sharing it as a discussion object rather than as a music-release
announcement.

With thanks,
Denys Rzhavskyi / R愛
https://www.rzhavsky.com/en/about