水 蛙 古

の 飛 池

音 び

込

む

Gotta love haiku.
Old pond, frog jumps in, sound of water.

It helps to speak and read Japanese to really appreciate it. Poetry is not just the words, it the sounds the words make. People forgot that after Ezra Pound dumped his crap on the literary world, and effete dupes that they were, they loved him for it. Rolled around in it.

We need Poe and Baudelaire and Byron and Wordsworth. Use Whitman for bumwad. George Garrett, and people who have the wits to mean while they sound. Who can make a sonnet anymore?

Even Robert Service, who carried a rhyming dictionary with him everywhere, sounds good and tells a great story, and it sticks with you because he means and he sounds. I wonder how he carried the dictionary around after the War since his arm was blown off by German artillery as he was driving wounded French soldiers away from the front as an American volunteer? (don't think I was serious in asking that question... pour qui me prends tu? )

Have you read Rilke in translation? No. You read the translator's efforts. You can only read Rilke in German. Have you read Pushkin in translation? No. You can't translate poetry.

PS
How do you get things to go where they're supposed to go on this page? Like getting the pictures or ideographs (kanjis) to line up proper?