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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Japanese Death Poems
HardwareLust wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Yes, some of the translations are inexact, but what gets me is how many
of these are still beautiful and even profound even after they are
translated.
layman51 wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
So this is where the Tenchu video game series gets its inspiration for
some of its game over screens.
jackdoe wrote 1 day ago:
in contrast: death row inmate's last statements
HTML [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250221030618/https://www.tdcj.te...
ge96 wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, I wonder what I would say if I had no choice but to accept dying
Maybe just one word F
Makes me think of that infinite improbability drive scene 2005, these
people reach the end of their maze, life path
Rooster61 wrote 1 day ago:
I feel the profound
written word austerity;
Death, captured in time
evanjrowley wrote 1 day ago:
If you enjoy longer poems, then you might like The Rag and Bone Shop of
the Heart (1992).
HTML [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162343.The_Rag_and_Bone_Sh...
stared wrote 1 day ago:
In the topic of death poems, I consider "You Want It Darker" by Leonard
Cohen a masterpiece. He was 83 with terminal cancer. Yet, this song
captures both his wit & spirit at its height.
locusofself wrote 1 day ago:
such a good tune
ThrowawayTestr wrote 1 day ago:
"Death poems
are mere delusionâ
death is death."
Hardcore
andyjohnson0 wrote 1 day ago:
Donât just stand there with your hair turning gray,
soon enough the seas will sink your little island.
So while there is still the illusion of time,
set out for another shore.
No sense packing a bag.
You wonât be able to lift it into your boat.
Give away all your collections.
Take only new seeds and an old stick.
Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail.
Donât be afraid.
Someone knows youâre coming.
An extra fish has been salted.
by Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928â1995)
from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About
Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski
tl2do wrote 1 day ago:
As a native Japanese speaker, I'm happy to see our literature
introduced to other countries. But I also feel conflicted.
The original Japanese of the first poem is:
ãã»ããªãåºã®é¦ãæ£ãç´
è
The translation on the site:
> I am not worthy
> of this crimson carpet:
> autumn maple leaves.
This contains the translator's interpretation, and the sound and
intonation are completely lost. I admire the translator's effort, but I
want visitors to understand how much this differs from the original.
hirvi74 wrote 20 min ago:
As a native speaker, would there be any way that you could translate
this back one poem back into Japanese? I am curious what the original
would be, and if the translation was truly accurate. It was favorite
one from the article:
RAIZAN (æ¥å±±)
Died on the 3rd day of the 10th month, 1716 at the age of 63
Farewell, sireâ
like snow, from water come
to water gone.
jerf wrote 1 day ago:
Sound and intonation are never going to translate between Japanese
and English. It's not even on the table.
Such things can't even necessarily translate well between two
languages as similar as French and English. Japanese and English is
completely hopeless.
It's true in the other direction too, though this being an English
site it might be more easily neglected. I've seen some English songs
translated into Japanese, keeping the same syllable count scheme. The
Japanese is radically simplified compared to the English, with entire
adverbs, adjectives, even clauses removed. And that's even before we
ask whether Japanese necessarily has the correct words to translate
some of the richer English concepts with their own centuries of
history and connotation behind them that these songs contained.
It is what it is. There isn't much that can be done about it. Even if
someone made an exhaustive translation of something, it could never
be repacked into something that matches the original concise packing.
lo_zamoyski wrote 1 day ago:
This is the general problem with literature and poetry especially.
They're not entirely translatable.
- Languages are part of culture and they are historically
conditioned, making them necessarily bounded and finite [0]. While
the essential thing signified may be the same for corresponding words
in two languages (snow vs. Schnee), there is variance in semantic
emphasis, connotation, and symbolic significance. In other words, the
pragmatic aspect of language is highly contextual and conditioned.
- Words can be used univocally, equivocally, or analogically, and
there isn't necessarily a correspondence between these constellations
across any two languages. But so much of wordplay trades on such
constellations.
- The syntactic and phonetic features peculiar to a language - apart
from the what is signified per se - is heavily exploited by poetry.
[0] This reminds me of words like the Greek λÏÎ³Î¿Ï (logos), which
does not find a satisfactory counterpart in any language as far as I
can tell. (Approximations are Tao, á¹ta, or Ma'at, for instance.)
You see this difficulty in the translation of John 1 where it is
usually rendered verbum or word, which have their own perfections,
but fail to do justice to the richness of the original meaning of
Logos in passages like John 1:1 and 1:3: "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [...] All
things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made
that was made." When you substitute "Word" with "Logos", you can
clearly see how much more pregnant that message is, e.g., that,
contrary to the pagan mythology of those John was addressing, in the
beginning there was order, not chaos; that God is Reason; that
everything that exists is caused by God and therefore fundamentally
intelligible. (Curiously, the Latin Verbum is better than the Greek
at emphasizing the procession of divine Reason as Second Person from
the First Person in the Trinity.)
osullivj wrote 1 day ago:
By "procession", do you allude to the filioque clause? Agreed on
difficulty of translation as I follow Quine so think a language as
a whole is the unit of meaning as opposed to any specific granular
element.
lo_zamoyski wrote 1 day ago:
> By "procession", do you allude to the filioque clause?
The filioque is about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the
Father and the Son, not the Son from the Father.
darkerside wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like trying to replicate the meter in English is a silly
constraint
I would prefer to know how each line would be best interpreted if it
weren't a haiku
tl2do wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
I am not a literature lover. I found a modern language
interpretation of the poem. Many interpretation are possible. But I
feel this is relevant.
I translated it to English.
============
ãã»ããªãåºã®é¦ãæ£ãç´
è "Ohokenaki toko no nishiki
ya chiri momiji" is interpreted as a haiku-like expression of
introspection and refined aesthetic sensibility â one in which
the speaker, surrounded by undeserved honor (ohokenaki) and
luxurious living (toko no nishiki = sumptuous furnishings), gazes
upon the fleeting falling autumn leaves and reflects on their own
vanity and attachment to life.
Key points of interpretation:
ãã»ããªã Ohokenaki (身ã®ç¨ç¥ãã /çãå¤ã):
Refers to a luxurious situation or standing that exceeds one's true
worth or station â something almost presumptuous to possess.
åºã®é¦ Toko no nishiki: Literally, a beautifully brocaded floor
covering; a symbol of opulence. By extension, it evokes the sight
of vivid autumn leaves carpeting the ground â the splendor of
autumn (nishiki-aki) likened to a gorgeous spread of fabric.
æ£ãç´
è Chiri momiji : Falling, scattering autumn leaves â a
classic symbol of impermanence and the Buddhist sense of transience
(mujo).
Overall picture: The speaker finds themselves in lavish
surroundings that feel undeserved (ohokenaki), while the scattering
leaves (mujo) adorn that world with a beauty that is at once
gorgeous and hollow â a quiet contrast between humility and the
ephemeral.
Even amid a life of splendor, the sight of leaves falling reveals a
universal truth â that all things must eventually end. The poem
captures a mood that is gently melancholic yet elevated: savoring
that beauty from a place of quiet, dignified acceptance.
Noaidi wrote 1 day ago:
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.
~~
Having a mental illness and being homeless I sit with my life now and
let it melt. I know death is coming so I just let it come. I tried to
force death to come twice, but I found that suffering is really no
different that joy.
I live in a van right now so I am upper class homeless but soon I may
be totally shelterless. Part of me is looking forward to it. Through
the last ten years, moving from riches to rags, all my past
attachments, all I can do is laugh at myself. There is such a weird
liberation in inescapable suffering and I hope you all get to
experience it someday.
DaedalusII wrote 1 day ago:
The sun sips the sky until it is drowning
I am circling my prey
If I am strong, the world will finally let us be
HTML [1]: https://pearlharbor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/USS-Essex-C...
pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
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: [1] You have (1) the original Greek, (2) word-by-word lookup,
(3) translation notes, and (4) multiple translations.
HTML [1]: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:199...
tl2do wrote 1 day ago:
I am a native Japanese
Original Kanji - hiragana works:
ãã»ããªãåºã®é¦ãæ£ãç´
è
How it sounds:
Oh ke naki
Yukano nishikiya
chiri ko yo
mncharity wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
>> 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] [2]
[3] [4] [4] [5]
HTML [1]: https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E3%81%8A...
HTML [2]: https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/JcJSRgDDvT84M16x7RJDb
HTML [3]: https://share.google/aimode/FNEXZGRPFPANlvNwd
HTML [4]: https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/wjaWnGHNpGs18X4M6CJV6
HTML [5]: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%99%9A%E7%99%BD
buntsai wrote 1 day ago:
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?
tl2do wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
Try an image search with ç´
è è½è. The result will be the
typical image a Japanese person imagines when hearing æ£ãç´
è. Then try the same search with "crimson carpet." From the
standpoint of literary and artistic sensibility, the difference
is not small.
nekooooo wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
my imagination when reading æ£ãç´
è is an enka song lol
tl2do wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
You hit the point. Image from enka will be nearly identical
to ones from poem.
darkerside wrote 1 day ago:
Oh ho ke na ki?
tl2do wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
It is modern Japanese pronunciation. In classical literature,
ãã» is pronounced as a prolonged "o" (an elongated /oË/
sound).
HK-NC wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Does that apply to longer vowels with the same(ish) sound, as
in å æå¿å ±?
tl2do wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
Yes, and no.
å ± . this is contemporary word. it pronounces "ho-o", not
"ho", not "o-o", not "o". Someone read "bo-o".
buntsai wrote 1 day ago:
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...
pndy wrote 1 day ago:
This is surely epitaph equivalent from that part of the world
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph?useskin=vector
pelasaco wrote 1 day ago:
"A last fart:
are these the leaves
of my dream, vainly falling?
In the original, the image of a dream is combined with the cruder image
of passing wind.."
Is the wind representing the fart here?
pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
"Passing wind" is an English euphemism, the original does not use
"kaze" (wind) but goes straight for "he" (fart).
The original word order also puts the dream at the start and drops
fart right at the end, which I think is funnier than putting it on
the first line.
Rooster61 wrote 1 day ago:
I particularly loved this one. I interpreted it as a man indulging
in one last ephemeral vanity. A literal last fart in the whirlwind
of life used as a metaphor to illustrate how useless mankind's
boasts are next to the inevitability and finality of death
shawn_w wrote 1 day ago:
Passing wind is another term (among many others) for farting.
seletskiy wrote 1 day ago:
Now that my storehouse
has burned down, nothing
conceals the moon.
This piece instantly reminded me of Ashes and Snow movie, where one of
the poems has very similar opening (followed, in my opinion, by even
more beautiful piece, which you can easily find if interested):
Ever since my house burnt down,
I see the moon more clearly
I wonder whether or not this is just a coincidence.
the_sleaze_ wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
"when my house burned down, I gained an unobstructed view of the sky"
A different translation of the same
aanet wrote 1 day ago:
I was reminded of the writer Pico Iyer's beautiful writing in Aflame:
Learning from Silence of exactly this sentiment, after his house
burned down [1] `My house burnt down
I can now see better
The rising moon`
HTML [1]: https://www.mariashriversundaypaper.com/pico-iyers-fire-grie...
block_dagger wrote 1 day ago:
Death is apparently snowy
DaedalusII wrote 1 day ago:
spirits travel to rest in the mountains after death. the mountain is
a place between life and death. there is much association between
mountains and death. then by extension snow
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know whether there is a specific japanese cultural
explanation, but in general it often was. In winter when it was cold,
those who lacked the strength to go on, layed down in the snow to
rest forever.
retrac wrote 1 day ago:
Everything dies in winter. And then is reborn. Everyone who lives
in a cold climate knows deep in their bones that cold and winter
are death.
Though if we're going to get stereotypical about national
characteristics (a dangerous game) then what might be more
specifically Japanese is the particularly heightened understanding
of this cycle. Or at least, its expression in art, when in the
west we might flinch away.
I'm currently reading Spring Snow, so probably some of Yukio
Mishima is drifting into my thoughts here. (Explaining puns ruins
them but there it is again: Yuki o. Snow.)
lemonberry wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
Not to mention the stillness and silence of new fallen snow.
Probably the closest in life we come to the stillness and silence
of death.
gcanyon wrote 1 day ago:
I don't remember who said it, but a statement that has stuck with
me is:
The moment when the most you can do is less than the least you need
to do, you die.
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