chased by the sun -
nowhere to go
perseguidos por el sol -
no pueden escapar
This is my entry to @bananafish's most superb haiku contest Mizu No Oto. The photograph, by fellow awarded haijin @sacra97, is the prompt.
I wrote my haiku in English, the only language I know. Since so many Spanish speaking haijin enter this contest, and many of those translate their work into English, I used a translator, DeepL, to provide a Spanish translation of mine. I have no idea if the translation is poetic, and know that there are still too many syllables in the last line, even though I tried translations of a few different English versions of "nowhere to go". I like the way this one rolls off my non-Spanish-speaking tongue, so there's that. But once again, it is easy to see that fewer syllables are needed for English haiku than for those in other languages.
Please join us!
Vaya que interesante la nieve y el sol en un recorrido a ver quien los atrapa @owasco bendiciones.
Yup, that's what your excellent photo said to me. I could feel the snow melting, could see it, could hear it crackle
.
Thank you very kind @owasco
wonderful poem :) thanks for sharing!
thanks for appreciating!
Great job at this tricky poetic form. I have never tried one of these.
The spanish translation reads well. I know from experience that it is extremely hard to translate poetry, even when rhyme or metric is not an issue.
It occurs to be that maybe a 5-syllable word like "acorralados" (surrounded, corralled, enclosed) may do the trick as a last line, but again, I am not a hiku expert 😊.
hm. 5 syllable words as lines are really cool, but that one doesn't capture the passage of time I was going for. I thought better of my own last line when I put "escape" in the translator, but left it anyway.
Thanks for your thoughts! Give it a shot yourself. Sometimes they take me a full week to write, sometimes they just pop out. This one took a couple days of thinking about the photo, and popped out when I noticed the snow was melting in the sun.
Since I am an Italian native speaker - and I think it can be noticed by my broken English - I constantly run into the problem of translating my haiku, or other poetry and prose writings.
With Spanish, it goes a little better because it's more similar to Italian, plus I was lucky enough to have a Chilean girlfriend for three years and learn from her.
I think I got around this by realizing that it's much easier to think of two different texts, especially in poetry, than of a translation.
For example, I see that your haiku in English is very close to that in Spanish, but in the third ku it differs, because where English is impersonal, in the Spanish version there is the personification of the snow tracks ("they cannot escape"). In the end I really like these attempts and I think both haiku are very beautiful. Obviously the "real" one in your case is the one in your language ;)
Interesting! I put a few different versions of my third ku into the translator, trying to shorten the line in Spanish. I loved "escape" and thought about changing my own haiku, but ultimately decided to leave it. But now I see the increases anthropomorphic nature of "escape" to "go" and like it much better:
traces of snow
chased by the sun -
no escape
oh that is so much better!!! We bring in destiny! Demise! Thanks for the comment!
You are welcome! I love when inspirations come from the talk
I love poems of winter.