An old pond

A frog jumping in

The sound of water.

It pictures the loneliness of an old pond, around which all is so still that the jumping of a frog into the water may be heard.

The composition of Chinese poems by Japanese is one of the most artificial processes of poetising. Chinese characters are divided according to their intonation into those of even and oblique sounds, that is, characters which are pronounced straight and evenly and those in the pronunciation of which the voice changes in tone. A Chinese poem is composed in various combinations of these two kinds of characters, and certain lines in a verse have to rhyme. Now, the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters makes no distinction in their intonation; they are all pronounced in the same tone, Hence, whereas a Chinese can tell at once by its pronunciation whether a character has an even or an oblique sound, a Japanese must learn by heart the tone-quality of every character if he wishes to compose Chinese poems; the knowledge of this tone-quality is of no use to a Japanese for other purposes. Moreover, the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters differs entirely from the Chinese; it is believed to be a corruption of the Chinese pronunciation in ancient times. The normal grammatical order in a Chinese sentence is that the verb precedes the object, whereas in Japanese the object usually precedes the verb; the result is that in reading a Chinese poem in Japanese the rhyming words do not always end the lines. As the Japanese simply composes according to rule, his lines are sometimes unrecitable in Chinese. Now, to show the difference between the Chinese and Japanese manner of reading a Chinese poem, we will first give a poem in the original Chinese.

  1. 滕王高閣臨江渚
  2. 佩玉鳴鸞罷歌舞
  3. 畫棟朝飛南浦雲
  4. 珠簾暮卷西山雨
  5. 閒雲潭影日悠々
  6. 物換星移幾度秋
  7. 閣中帝子今何在
  8. 檻外長江空自流

The Chinese would read the poem in this style:—

  1. T’eng wang kao kê lin kiang chu
  2. P’ei yü ming luan pa kê wu
  3. Hua tung ch’ao fei nan p’u yün
  4. Chu lien mu kuan hsi shan yü
  5. Hsien yün t’an ying jih yu yu
  6. Wu huan hsing i chi tu ch’iu
  7. Kê chung ti tzu kin hê tsai
  8. Kien wai ch’ang kiang k’ung tzu liu.

The Japanese would read it in an entirely different manner:—

  1. Tō-ō no kōkaku kōsho ni nozomeri
  2. Haigyoku meiran kabu wo yamu
  3. Gwatō ashita ni tobu nanpo no kumo
  4. Shuren kare ni maku seizan no ame
  5. Kan-un tan-ei hi ni yū-yū
  6. Mono kawari hoshi utsuru ikutabi no aki
  7. Kakuchū no teishi ima izuku ni zo aru
  8. Kangwai no chōkō munashiku onozukara nagaru.