At the Limits of Translation? Visual Poetry and Bashō’s Multimodal Frog
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses several visual poems that both translate and adapt Bashō's popular frog haiku; such works are theorized here as multimodal transaptations. Bashō's poem blends form and meaning, action and stasis, sound and silence. Traditional translations struggle to incorporate some of these features because of the limitations of the target language. Visual poetry, by drawing on the affordances of print – which includes verbal, visual, and diagrammatic cues – is better equipped to reflect and extend the style and content of Bashō's haiku into the more limited forms of English textuality, while also engaging in the playfulness of the haiku and calligraphic traditions. Produced through a hybrid, multimodal approach, these visual transaptations present the reader with a range of cues that are neither strictly mimetic nor adaptive, and which challenge assumptions about stylistic choices, translation, authorship, and poetic meaning.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it