The Sound of Water: Matsuo Basho and the Old Pond | Hacker News Reader

The Sound of Water: Matsuo Basho and the Old Pond

inquiringmind.com

22 pointssquircle6 comments

The poem discussed has been translated many times in many different ways. There’s even a book, by Hiroaki Sato, that collects more than a hundred versions in English [1]. Here are a few:

R. H. Blyth

The old pond.

A frog jumps in—

Plop!

Clara A. Walsh

An old-time pond, from off whose shadowed depth

Is heard the splash where some lithe frog leaps in.

Inazo Nitobe

Into a old pond

A frog took a sudden plunge,

Then is heard a splash.

Harold G. Henderson

An ancient pond;

Plash of the water

When a frog jumps in.

Allen Ginsberg

The old pond

A frog jumped in,

Kerplunk!

Limerick

There once was a curious frog

Who sat by a pond on a log

And, to see what resulted,

In the pond catapulted

With a water-noise heard round the bog.

[1] https://search.worldcat.org/title/31783352

>Limerick

Speaking of limericks, here is a good one that I read in a nonsense poetry book as a kid; it was called "The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense". It was meant for kids. The limerick was a little subtle, at least for me at that time, but I figured it out after a bit, and had a good laugh:

Into the drinking well

Which the plumber built her

Aunt Eliza fell

We must buy a filter

See, this is the sort of thing I expect chatgpt/copilot to produce. Instead, I ask for a joke and it returns the most flat-lined humor. Guess I'll have to run my own local models.

Gadzooks! With ChatGPT et al, we must lower our expectations, instead of having https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Expectations

    mkdir pond
    touch pond/frog
    printf '\a'

Aha! An open trap in broad daylight on the front page of HN. Pond.. Pondering.. Ponderer.. Plop!

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