Check out my photograph, Erqi, in GUD Issue 6.

In coconut fourteen, Chad Sweeney‘s 33 Translations of One Basho uses a concept designed to draw at least the reader prone to analysis into the work as it raises questions about the meaning of translation. The first in the series is the most familiar version of a Basho haiku, the second more unusual but carrying essentially the same meaning, the third perhaps a conceptual-metaphorical interpretation, and the connection grows more tenuous from there.

The effect of the title is such that the less clear the connection the more the reader must reinterpret and redefine the term translation. Readers with stricter definitions who will not bend them even for a temporary period, even to see from another’s perspective, will leave the poem if not before translation 9 with its straight-line equation and empty set, then certainly after they catch sight of it. This does not make the poem a failure. On the contrary, such a poem would succeed best if every reader abandoned it before the end as then the poet would have succeeded in probing the limits of everone’s willingness to reconsider translation.

The exception is if readers were to leave from boredom. A cliché line like “dark night of the soul” increases the odds of such negative attrition, especially when it’s found among so many abstractions and figures that, while human, are minimally defined. Without characters or richly descriptive footholds for a reader’s interest, language becomes that much more important. Music too: “entropy of bees” with its echoing e’s succeeds here (so that perhaps the dark night that follows can be survived). The percussives, r’s, and l’s of “koan of irreconcilable relations” make the abstraction less likely to be found dull.

In the end, however, for those readers whose limits of definitional flexibility have not been reached, the literal (letter-al) frog reappears, escaping into something modern, human-channelled nature, and certainly not prettified: “to lay her eggs / in the rain gutter”.