"Tonight we light the fires/call our ships to port/tonight we walk on water/tomorrow we'll be gone"

Following up on the previous, the craft of translation includes not just getting the right words, but the right tone. Okay, that belabors the obvious. An example.

The famously passionate 9th-century poet Ono no Komachi is known as not just as love poet but as a master of the rhetorical tools of her language. Her poems are rarely simple statements, and most have at least one "pivot word," a homophone with one meaning when read as part of the phrase before it but another as part of the phrase after (one even has five pivots). Thus, when translating

秋の夜も 名のみなりけり あふと言へば ことぞともなく 明けぬるものを

aki no yo mo
na nomi narikeri
au to ieba
koto zo tomo naku
akenuru mono o

you should resist, however strong the temptation, rendering it as

It's, like, so not true
that nights are getting longer,
'cause we'd just hooked up
and were all, woah, when like -- woah --
it was all dawn already. Jeeze!

Yes, the original is multiple short, almost allusive phrases, reflecting the speaker's passion and frustration, but still. An early Heian-era Japanese noblewoman is not a Valley Girl. Better would something like

    Autumn nights are long,
I now know, in name only,
    for when we do meet
by the time we even speak
it is all too quickly dawn.

Tone matters. As does getting it right -- I confess I'm not sure I've correctly gotten the sense of ieba. But even with that caveat, it's much better than the first -- if only because it isn't so, so wrong.

---L.