How public—like a frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
–Emily Dickinson

The book One Hundred Frogs, edited and compiled by the Japanese poet and translator Hiroaki Sato, is a charming little volume, small enough to slip into a coat pocket. It contains over one hundred translations or English versions of the famous “frog haiku” written by the great haiku master Matsuo Bashō. It is also, to my immense delight, a flip-book showing, if you riffle the pages front to back, a cartoon frog leaping from a grassy bank into the water. 

Bashō’s poem, dating from around 1686, is made up of the traditional seventeen syllables in Japanese, and is the most well-known haiku ever written. 

Translating the poem into English has proved a vexing challenge for generations of translators. The first two-thirds of the haiku is the easy part: there’s an old pond; a frog jumps into it. As Robert Hass points out, it’s that final line where translations sink or swim. His version of the poem ends with the literal translation of the line: “sound of water.” I like that. Sato says that the original Japanese of the last line is not onomatopoetic. Mizu no oto may not meet the strict definition of onomatopoeia, but that hasn’t stopped the poem’s many translators from trying. In Sato’s book, we get versions of the haiku ending with splash, plop plop fizz fizz, kdang, flop, blip/splat, and perhaps my favorite, Allen Ginsberg’s kerplunk. 

The sound Bashō is describing is one that has become quite familiar to me. About a decade ago, I got out my shovel, pickax, and iron spud bar one fall and spent around a week digging a large pit descending in shelves at the back corner of our garden. I lined it with rubber sheeting, obscured the edges with some of the many chunks of Ozark sandstone pried out of our garden beds, filled the depression with water, and planted lilies and miniature cattails. 

By early spring, the water churned with frogs and frog spawn and then tadpoles. I’ve often wondered how they found our little pond. It’s in the middle of a large field surrounded by woods and, for much of the year, the slope around it is a dry expanse of brittle grass. I like to imagine the frogs waiting for one of our rock-tumbling Ozark deluges to set off from their homes in algae-clotted ditches and basins, but that’s a theory for which I have no proof. Somehow, though, by early February the silent nights of winter were shattered by the racket of peepers announcing their presence—just as Dickinson said they would. And now, almost every evening from early spring through late fall, when we walk past the pond, at least one frog will fling itself from the rocks into the water. 

There’s something almost comically clumsy about the motion. It’s not a swift and graceful dive executed to make the smallest ripple possible. No, it’s closer to a belly flop with the accompanying huge splash jostling the water lily pads. Seamus Heaney, in his own frog poem, referred to the sound as an “obscene . . . slap and plop.” Once the frog is in the water, though, it is instantly transformed into the swift and muscular swimmer it is. The frog swims off into depths unknowable to us, hidden, beyond our reach. 

The more I’ve thought about his haiku, the more it seems to me that that’s a part of what Bashō is talking about. And the stand-in for the transformation, what we can perceive of it, is the sound of the water, the silence that precedes and follows it. And that’s what the poem itself is, that’s what it captures. The poem IS the splash breaking the silence and from that interruption, meaning ripples out and out. What happens in the poem happens, literally, under the surface. 

Thinking all this led me, against much of my better judgment, to throw poetic caution to the wind and join the ranks of the many translators ultimately vanquished by Bashō’s perfect little poem. Here, for what they’re worth, are the seventeen syllables of my own defeat: 

	when a frog jumps
	into the water of the old pond 
	this is the sound