TEXT: Haiku

[Matthew Faupel <matthew@CPDAPO.TELE.NOKIA.FI>]

mi cusku zoi gliban.

I have a fondness for the Japanese "haiku" poem form and thought I'd have a
go at a Lojban haiku.  For those not in the know, haiku are three lines
long, with a normal syllable pattern of 5-7-5 (though this can be broken).
The subject is quite often humorous and/or to do with nature though neither
of these are musts.

The crucial element is that they try to capture how the author feels, or
some insight that they've had through a description of an event rather than
direct commentary, in other words it tries to make the reader see the event
through the author's eyes.

So, having looked at various Lojban texts and noted their relative brevity,
I thought that Lojban might be an interesting language in which to try and
write a haiku.

I started off with an english haiku:

    The sun cedes the sky
   to dusk; a golden river
    runs across the lake.

which I then attempted to translate into Lojban (give me a couple of years
and I might start spontaneously creating in Lojban, but not yet :-)

gliban. .i lemi pamoi pemci du lu<<

    le solri te lebna
    le tsani le murse
    .i le solji flecu
    cu kuspe le lalxu

>>li'u .ike'unai mi cusku zoi gliban.

This though had the obvious problem that it didn't fit into 17 syllables by
some way (and had a rather boring structure to boot).  I'm also not sure
that "flecu cu kuspe le lalxu" captures the oddness of seeing a river on a
lake as "flecu" is less specific and could be interpreted as "current".

By discarding certain elements and leaving even more up to the imagination
of the reader, I got:

gliban. .i lemi remoi pemci du lu<<

      le solji flecu
   cu kuspe le lalxu ca
      le nunsolcanci

>>li'u .ike'unai mi cusku zoi gliban.

I hope that the above translates (unpoetically) as:

    That-which-is-described-as-a gold-sort-of river/flow
    is_across that-which-is-described-as-a lake at-the-same-time-as
    that-which-is-described-as-an event-of-sun-disappearing

Which just about works... I think (if nunsolcanci is a reasonable lujvo for
sunset - I couldn't find one in the jvoste).

Does anyone have any better ideas about translating this?  Or for that
matter any comments on my attempts?

gliban. .i

co'o mi'edoi matius.