To write yet another essay on Basho's "pond-frog" haiku, I was recently rereading Helen Tworkov's "Zen in America" (1994). In the early 1980s I had published "One Hundred Frogs," an assemblage of English translations and variation of the 17-syllable verse, and I thought to include the one in "Zen" if there were a revised edition of the book.
The translation was in the section on Zentatsu Richard Baker and the translator was Edwin O. Reischauer, with whom he studied at Harvard. As he remembered it, the translation went: "Old pond / Frog jumps in / Watersound."
That must have taken place a few years before the famous scholar became the U.S. ambassador to Japan in 1961.
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