For some reason which may be connected with a northern liking for taciturn concision, the modern Japanese verse form known as haiku is often encountered in the work of Nordic poets. Here are some Swedish examples. And here are some haiku by the Estonian poet Andres Ehin. The trick for the translator is to observe the 17-syllable rule (not always easy to follow when the poems migrate to English). I tried my hand at this poem from Pia Tafdrup's haiku collection Boomerang:
Tærsklen til døden:
Månemørkt indre rige
-- passagers lysflod.
Månemørkt indre rige
-- passagers lysflod.
The threshold of death:
Moon-dark inner kingdom
-- lightflood of passages.
No, it's definitely not as easy as it looks, and somehow the English versions never look quite as "compressed" as the originals.
