Bashō's Pond

[ananzi]

Old pond,
frog jumps
Plop.

The sound of water in Bashō's poem about the frog has been translated in a variety of ways - splash, shhh, plop. Good sounds can't easily be put into ordinary words.

One day I'd like to open my own musical instrument store in which I would sell fountains of running water tuned in fourths and fifths, and trees with leaves voiced for sleep that could be placed near a bedroom window, and long metal tubes of such low resonance they could be felt but not heard, and beehives in which the pedal point of the bees could be amplified with a sounding box, and treble frogs and bass frogs, and stones that could be dropped on each other for percussion, and drinking glasses that could be either struck lightly or rubbed, and a bird feeder that would attract a variety of singers, and fish that would make sonorous bubbles in a pond.

My store would be called Bashō's pond.

- Thomas Moore, in Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life