At the Limits of Translation? Visual Poetry and Bashō’s Multimodal Frog

Abstract

This paper discusses several visual poems that both translate and adapt Bashō's popular frog haiku; such works are theorized here as multimodal transaptations. Bashō's poem blends form and meaning, action and stasis, sound and silence. Traditional translations struggle to incorporate some of these features because of the limitations of the target language. Visual poetry, by drawing on the affordances of print – which includes verbal, visual, and diagrammatic cues – is better equipped to reflect and extend the style and content of Bashō's haiku into the more limited forms of English textuality, while also engaging in the playfulness of the haiku and calligraphic traditions. Produced through a hybrid, multimodal approach, these visual transaptations present the reader with a range of cues that are neither strictly mimetic nor adaptive, and which challenge assumptions about stylistic choices, translation, authorship, and poetic meaning.