So I’m doing this one differently and diving straight into my impressions.

The poem

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in—
And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the Guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.

Rereading it now

It is lively and rhythmic, and you almost can’t help but clap your hands to its beat. Of course, the twist at the end is unexpected and all the more devastating because of the upbeat tone of everything before it.

The images of the dancing and then the empty dance hall, with the distant sound of the waterfall of Doom, left a mark on me when I first read the poem. Rereading it now doesn’t change that at all.

Hearing it

I listened to this recording, thinking it was Belloc. I don’t think it was.

The inn I had always wondered about

The history and context I found were fairly sparse, and I didn’t learn much that wasn’t already in the poem. I’ve known the poem for a long time, though, and have occasionally wondered what inn—or what evening—would inspire him to write it.

A little research suggests, the inn may have been the Hotel Sisas in Canfranc, below the Somport Pass. Belloc mentions it in The Pyrenees, where he describes the cooking as “doubtful” and the wine as “so-so.” The Aragón, the inn and the bad wine all fit. He never says that this was the place behind the poem, though.

That is as close as I could get. I still do not know anything about the evening itself, or who Miranda was.

Neither the reading nor the context changed my sense of the poem. I still read it much as I did when I was a teenager.

The sound or image I kept thinking about

The image and sound I keep thinking about are, of course, the ghostly steps of non-existent dancers and the distant, dreaded boom of the waterfall.

Sources and versions

• Belloc’s 1923 collected text

• Belloc’s 1909 account of the Hotel Sisas and the inns around Somport

• The April 1921 magazine text

• Belloc’s 1919 manuscript record

• The reading I listened to—the reader is not identified

• Miranda Mackintosh’s correction

静夜思

床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
举头望明月，
低头思故乡。

Jìng yè sī

Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng,
Yí shì dì shàng shuāng.
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè,
Dī tóu sī gùxiāng.

A simple, naive translation

Before the bed, bright moonlight—
I think it is frost on the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon;
I lower my head and think of home.

Before I read a good translation

This took me back to being a child, still awake in bed late at night, when a full moon would peek out from behind the clouds. The frost made me picture crisp white blankets, matching the blanket I would be snuggled under while hiding from the cold.

There is something lonesome already about raising your head to look out of the window at the moon. Then the last line—“think of home”—really hits hard in the feels. It adds to the nostalgia.

I didn’t even attempt to sound out the Chinese myself because I have no familiarity with it. The first recording was much more sing-song and childlike than I expected. It made the poem sound almost upbeat, which did not match the homesickness I had pictured.

A more subdued reading still sounded upbeat to me. The words end with missing home, but the melody sounded happy.

After reading the translations

Of the four translations I read, I preferred Shigeyoshi Obata’s:

I saw the moonlight before my couch,
And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground.
I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon;
I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home.

Obata’s came closest, although it still does not quite feel like the poem I had pictured. That is strange given that I know no Chinese at all and he was the expert. I can see part of the distance now: I had added a window, clouds, a full moon, and blankets. None of those things is actually in the poem. They came from me.

The biggest change was the frost. I had imagined real frost on the ground outside. Now I see it as the gleam of moonlight, briefly mistaken for frost until the speaker looks up. There may be no actual frost, but the night still feels chilly.

What I learned

I also discovered that there is more than one Chinese version of the poem. The familiar version says “bright moonlight” in the first line and “bright moon” in the third. Some early printed versions instead say “watching moonlight” and “mountain moon.” That is why Obata writes “mountain moon”: he was translating a different version, not adding scenery of his own.

The poem has only twenty characters, arranged in four lines of five. In modern Mandarin, the last words of lines one, two, and four—guāng, shuāng, and xiāng: light, frost, and home—rhyme. The final two lines also mirror each other: raise the head, lower the head; look at the moon, think of home.

It has also been memorized and repeated by generations of children. That made the childlike sound of the recordings less surprising. A homesick poem can also be a poem children know by heart.

Li Bai spent much of his adult life travelling. The last word, gùxiāng, means more than a house. It is an old or native place—the place someone comes from.

Rereading it

My first reading sent me back to childhood. Reading it again made me think about leaving home.

I left home a long time ago, and these days I often feel nomadic and untethered to any particular place. That makes the last line carry more weight, not less. I am not always sure which place I mean when I think of home. Rereading it brings a sting to my eyes.

The image I kept thinking about

I still picture the pale light of a full moon, almost unreachably far away and yet visible and seemingly graspable.

Sources and versions

• Original Chinese text

• First Mandarin recording

• More subdued Mandarin recitation

• Shigeyoshi Obata’s translation

• Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu’s translation

• Herbert A. Giles’s translation

• L. Cranmer-Byng’s translation

• The poem’s textual history

• Form and rhyme

古池や
蛙飛びこむ
水の音

Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

A small invitation before the translation

Before you read a translation, try saying the romanized Japanese aloud and then listen to the recording. I wrote down what I pictured before I knew what the words meant. If you want to try the same experiment, stop here for a minute.

Then come back to this deliberately naive translation:

A simple, naive translation

An old pond—
a frog jumps in,
the sound of water.

Before I read a good translation

I picture an old green pond with algae, surrounded by drooping trees leaning over it. I can feel the coolness, as if there were a breeze, although there is no wind or movement.

The frog may have been there all along, camouflaged by the foliage. Then it jumps: a plop, circular waves spreading across the water, and the pond slowly settling again. If I close my eyes, I can almost smell the earth, greenery, and water—not fresh, but not stagnant either.

When I tried to say the Japanese, it sounded almost stochastic to me: jumpy, and not flowing off my tongue. Then I listened to the recording and realized I had been mispronouncing it. Spoken properly, it felt much more peaceful and much closer to the scene I had imagined.

What gets lost in translation?

W. G. Aston translated the poem this way in 1899:

An ancient pond!
With a sound from the water
Of the frog as it plunges in.

Lafcadio Hearn’s 1898 version is much barer:

Old pond—frogs jumping in—sound of water.

I prefer Aston’s translation because it feels closer to what I first imagined: tranquility, stillness, and one lonesome frog. Hearn’s plural “frogs” feels much more active. I start wondering what made all of them jump and what frightened them enough to break the stillness.

Japanese leaves the number open, but English makes the translator choose. I was surprised by how much that one choice changed the scene for me.

What I learned

I was surprised to learn that this very quiet scene came out of a social event. The poem dates to spring 1686 and opens Kawazu Awase—The Frog Contest—a collection of frog poems arranged in twenty paired contests after a gathering at Bashō’s hut.

Earlier Japanese poetry usually noticed the frog’s singing voice; kawazu was also a conventional spring word. Bashō pays attention to a different frog sound.

An account published six years later says Bashō had the final two lines first. Kikaku suggested opening with yamabuki ya—“yellow kerria—”—but Bashō chose furuike ya: “old pond—.” It is not a transcript, and it does not prove there was no real pond. Still, it made me wonder whether the sound came first and the pond came later.

Rereading after reading a couple of different translations

For me, the original image survives. Knowing that earlier poems paid attention to frogs singing makes Bashō’s choice feel a little cheeky: he listens to the plop instead. But even without that history, the poem was already vivid and meaningful to me.

The line or image I kept thinking about

The image I keep coming back to is an iridescent green-and-red frog disappearing with a plop and leaving a symmetric splash behind it.

One-sentence afterthought

I keep seeing the splash after the frog has disappeared.

Sources and versions

• Original text and historical variants

• Japanese reading

• W. G. Aston’s translation

• Lafcadio Hearn’s translation

• Kawazu Awase and the poem’s 1686 setting

• The transmitted account of the poem’s opening