am reading a pre-circulated seminar paper for tomorrow's multilingual class. i won't quote any of it here because it is a paper in progress and not yet published, but just briefly, the author is interested in the reflection of japanese immigrant life through the body of senryu poetry produced in america. i had not known that the senryu is related to the haiku, both derived from renga (which accounts, possibly, for their identical structure.) she is also interested in that perennial problem of translation - whether senryu should be rendered literally, or in what in this paper is derisively called "paraphrases." i think that ties in nicely with shapiro's translations of chreole echoes in which he insisted on the necessity of recreation rather than translation, as if the original were only a springboard for his poetic somersaults, and of the (very free) french translations of martial's epigrams by the chreole poet louis allard.