Discursive linguistic problems in translations of a haiku by Matsuo Bashō from Japanese to Spanish.

Abstract

The difficulties of the translation process are of diverse nature, but without a doubt, the
discursive difficulties caused by the differences in the nature of languages deserve a special
place. Japanese is an agglutinating language with a subject-object-verb word order. Spanish
is an inflectional language and has a subject-verb-object order. How will these differences
affect literary translation, where "even form means"? And in the translation of poetry? And
in the translation of haiku, the quintessential Japanese poetic subgenre? These are questions
of great theoretical interest that we intend to help to answer.
This article will analyze the discursive difficulties derived from the different formal
nature of the Japanese and Spanish languages in various translations of a famous Japanese
haiku into the Spanish language, the Bashō frog haiku. For this, haiku will be introduced first
and its meaning and aesthetic characteristics will be exposed with a linguistically formal
correlate. Subsequently, several translations will be analyzed and compared with the
original, assessing how the different formal options influence the final result of the
translation, taking the Japanese original as a point of reference.