Yeah, that’s the trouble with poetry. I just can’t bring myself to allow it to be dismissed as impossible or untranslatable even though the reality is that it often is just that, and the best you can hope for is an adaptation. This is a huge topic that has a bunch of angles, and I highly recommend checking out Hofstadter’s Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language for a wonderfully thorough and optimistic treatment of translation and poetry.

And I have a soft spot for some of those older rhyme-ish translations like “Summer grass: Of stalwart warriors’ splendid dreams, the aftermath.” (Probably changed a bit by my memory.) The first two lines of the second translation work very well in that way. The last two have potential, I think, but feel a bit too awkward. Maybe it’s just my aversion to the word “darling.” Don’t mind me.

Oh, and I think I wasn’t totally clear—I meant that the translator ALWAYS winds up writing a new poem, regardless of conscientiousness and linguistic ingeniousness, which is (like you said) unavoidable.

I agree with you in principle, but in practice it is often ridiculously hard to bring the same density of sense that Japanese tanka have while maintaining the syllable count. Nobody seriously does rhyming translations anyway, but I feel like it’s worth an exploration—even though mine is obviously terrible.

Now, a few translators/translation do manage to bring over the essence of the original, but it is very hard. I definitely feel like it’s alright to take some liberties and go for analogous associations rather than trying to come up with identical ones, if that makes any sense. I agree that this stretches the notion of “translation,” but that kind of cognitive leap is perhaps unavoidable with translation of poetry.

Naturally, since translation is one of those topics on which equally-informed and -educated people can disagree vehemently about, there will never be a final solution. But that’s kind of why I like it (translation). You can always use another translation. Ultimately, if I had to choose one of these to use in a publication, I would of course go with my more literal one. But I still think the second one has value, if only as a place to start discussion.

Finally, having an accent, as you say, is fine, but blatant ungrammaticality is not, IMHO—and I have seen examples of this. Unless of course the original poem is also ungrammatical, in which case, sure.

In terms of really trying to get or give a sense of the original, then, I prefer as little tampering and embellishment as possible, given the almost impossible nature of the task. If that results in some odd English, so what? It’s like an accent: everyone fights so hard to get rid of it, without realizing that being too ordinary is not much of a virtue.

Translating poetry is difficult enough from a Romance language into English, but translating from Asian languages, even modern-ish Japanese, is such a pain. My Tang poetry class gave me such respect for translators of poetry.