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10 March 2005: I'm not done with the old pond, I guess. Someone (El Konde, I believe, who recently sent me his e.mail address and was the one discussing my agreement/argument dyptich a while ago) e.mailed me two translations of Basho's haiku yesterday. These were in response to my blog two days ago, so the writer had not seen my up-to-datest thoughts on the matter. His first version has the pond divided by silence: "old pond / silence = frog splash!" I like the idea of dividing the pond (arithmetically), but it'd be more logical, it seems to me, to divide silence by the frog to get the old pond. Aside from that, I prefer the silence the haiku is about, among other things, to be implied. In my version, it is not explicitly mentioned, but has to exist for the sound of the frog's splash to be heard, or picked out, or--really--to be centrally noticeable.
My correspondent's second translation also brings silence in explicitly, lessening its effect, I feel:
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