Hello, i would like some help with my Haiku. I just want to know if it follows the rules of haiku and am intrested in peoples opinion of it, so please tell me what you think. I also want to get it translated into japanese, does anyone know where i can get help with that? Thanks!
Powerful yet soft
Summer waves against the rocks
-To be like the wave.
Luke, I like your haiku! Ver nice, and it definitely follows the 5 - 7 - 5 format.
I may be able to find somebody to translate it into Japanese for you, but it may take a little while. I'll post another message here when I find out.
Cheers!
Reading this, keep in mind that a) i am not a Japanese translator (I translate into english, thank you!) and b) i'm no haiku girl. in the second line, there seems to be no way in japanese to say it without a verb (trust me, i had a long consultation with my japanese colleagues) so the literal translation is "summer waves meeting the rocks." the last sentence gets a slight meaning shift since i couldn't think of a better way to put it. the infinitive structure which in english here could
express the desire to be like the wave does not really exist in japanese.
there's nothing so ambiguous like that. so in japanese it's more like be-like-wave thing. in my translation here, it does not follow the english haiku pattern. however, english haiku and japanese haiku are different. the japanese form is not restricted to the five-seven-five structure. it generally is hypermetric, but that is hypermetric based on japanese poetry. some famous haiku are five-ten-five. it also depends on how it's written since, unlike in english, you have a choice of letters,
which can make the sentence (haiku in japanese is written on one line) longer or shorter, which counts in haiku, i think. i don't really understand it that well. i read some explanations in japanese and they seem to be saying haiku is a short seasonal poem. the season thing seems to be the most important. japanese poetry is generally less concerned with rhyming and rhythm than english since the japanese language is inherently rhyming and rythmical. (explaining to a japanese person why rhymes in english are interesting is almost impossible!) it's more about word choice and especially unexpected word choice bringing to mind an unanticipated or unique image.
so after that long-winded and uninformative explanation, to answer your question about whether or not this could be a haiku in english:
maybe if someone better than me got their hands on it. but i have to say that translations rarely follow the exact meter of the poem in the original language. when you translate, you have to make a trade-off
between remaining faithful to the meaning or remaining faithful to the style/meter. it's pretty much impossible to do both. i think i could change
my translation to meet japanese hypermetric haiku style, but i would have to give up part of the meaning of the english original."
