Armed with my book of Japanese kana and her calculator-like word-finder, Junko and I sat at the dining room table and translated haiku, at least, we tried. I printed a transliterated version of the haiku on the page in front of us and Junko read through it, her hand opening and closing as she counted off the syllables with her fingers.

"Yes, haiku," she said, when her fingers closed into a fist at the end of the five-syllable last line. She scratched the poison ivy under her eye and began writing English words above the Japanese. Over the word ana she wrote "hole" and over ya she wrote a colon.

"Haiku very boring," she said, opening her eyes wide as she always does when she is excited. "But if you see in your mind--is okay."

Above the syllable no she wrote "s" but stumbled on the word in front of it. "Shoji," she whispered, "how say that?" Eyes wide, she typed quickly into her word-finder. "Shoji like sliding door," she mumbled, "but...." Then she showed me the definition on her machine: "A sliding door with a piece of Japanese paper on a lattice."

"Not good for Sam," she added with a giggle. She brought her hand down in a mock karate chop and said, "Bam."

"That's for sure," I said.

She wrote "sliding door" and the word "then" above the long first word in the first line and "Milky Way" above the last word in the poem.

"Ama-no-gawa," I said in her language, haltingly, like a child -- the word, not a word for me, but a plaything on my tongue.

"Mil -- ky Way," she answered. "Yes."

After a half hour of poking around at this text, our literal translation of Issa's haiku looked like this:

Then:
Sliding door's hole's
Milky Way.

We both examined the sheet for a while, not sure what to do next -- this was our first experiment in translating haiku, and the results seemed, well, meager.

"Words and meaning are very different," she said, apologetically. "You must picture."

Despairing of any verbal solution, she drew a stick figure picture of a person under a window with a hole in the shade. Then she drew several lines from the hole to the man.

"Moonlight," she said, still drawing the lines -- as if the figure were bathed in it. "Moonlight."

I looked back at her, puzzled, and pointed out that there was no mention of moon in the poem.

"Always moon in haiku -- if night, always moon. I sure." She scratched the poison ivy again just under the rim of her glasses. "Every peoples in Japan know this shoji and this moon," she said. "I sure. Must picture moon."

She looked at me and opened her eyes wide again, as if I might look through them and see what she sees. For a moment we shared what is lost in translation.

Cricket--
did you lose your voice
or become it.

--Basho