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A DOLPHIN IN THE WOODS
Composite Translation, Paraversing & Distilling Prose

An invitation to turn rhyming verses into a game as common as crossword puzzles, critical essays on five books of multiple translation, samples of the composite-reading style of multiple translation pioneered by the author.

A DOLPHIN has 8 punning pictures by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), and no index but a dual Table of Contents, one ordinal and one categorical. The main title is part of a phrase from Horace who warned those who played with words and variation in translation to take care lest they end up with a dolphin in the woods and a boar in the flood (delphinum sylvis appingit, fluctibus aprum).

ORDINAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
 

01   The Way of Ways, or count the ways to translate the first 6 characters of the Tao-Te-Ching.   21

02   Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! or the miraculous birth of elegant composite translation clusters.   35

03  “Still to be neat,” “The Essay on Man” and other challenges for metaphysical paraverse    51

04   God without turns demon within, or how aphorisms may be multiplied to no end.    63
 

05   100 Frogs, or  why a perfect translation of the world’s most famous haiku is impossible!  69

06   Fly-ku!  – the more you swat, the more they come . . . or composite-translation normalized. . . 77

07   A Prayer to Silence the Howl-monster, or how to translate an untranslatable Chinese lullaby  87

08   Haikuing Thoreau’s Flies & making Dillard’s Mockingbird a pelican.  Distilling good stuff   95
 

09   Nineteen Ways to kill a poem in translation and a few more of my own!   101     

10   Cherry Blossom Epiphany  – a petal blizzard of composite-translation . . . 111 

11   Rabid ghost crabs, & gallant man-o-war – distilling a contemporary amateur’s poems  125

12   Any Moonshiners out there? An appeal to my readers for examples of prose distillation:  131 

13   A Hundred Poets, making one by Michitsuna’s mother interesting, anyway!   133

14   The 5^th Season – the re-creation of the world & Japanese in English. More composite, yet.  139

15   Sunflower Heads & Naked Trees –  amateur haiku, or paraversing as improvement  147

16   Riding a Spruce Through a Storm –  distilling 19c nature-writing’s purple prose  151
 

17   Le Ton Beau de Marot’s  A une Damoyselle malade:  reading the plump variations.  165

18   Octopussy & The Woman Without a Hole, or composite translation for senryû, too.  179

19   Wedged between her Symplegades, or let’s stand up for wonderful translations from Latin! 185

20   Piss not on the moon – double-take: did I paraverse that soon?   193
 

21   Issa’s Fart-bug, or going out with a blast: my boldest paraversing.  201

22    Ten Thousand Leaves blowing in the wind: earliest paraverses, found last.  209

23    Mad In Translation, a neglected genre of poetry just asking for it!  221

24    Crossword to Paraverse: Why just pleasure yourself?  235

CATEGORICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
 

I  Multiple Translations: Watts/Tao-Te-Ching;  Sato/Bashô’s Frog; Mostow/100-poets, Hofstadter/Le Ton Beau de Marot, Weinberger/Nineteen Ways   ch. 1, 5, 9, 13, 17.  & my own 20, 21, 22.

II  Composite Translation exampled by my work:  Rise, Ye Sea Slugs, Fly-ku!, Cherry Blossom Epiphany, The 5^th Season, Octopussy, Dry Kidney & Blue Spots (aka The Woman Without a Hole), and Mad In Translation. respectively, ch. 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 23. & unpublished: 

III  Playing w/ Poems. Paraversing great poems, Distilling & paraversing poor poems , Paraversing translated nursery rhyme,  Multiplying poems to improve them,  ch  3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 24

IV  Prose-to-Prose & Prose-to-Poem paraversing.  Multiplying Aphorisms,  Distilling and para-versing a long prose piece, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 

V  Finale, The argument for paraversing yet, and the reason why paraversing should be as common as doing crossword puzzles  24