The Translation Conundrums.

Barking at the moon

On the rotting wharf that pilfering cur,
Pale yapping waif of a wharfinger,
Barks at the lonely moon:
The lonely at the lonelier.

O listen hard. By the wharf's stone wall
Where in the dark the water curls
To lap at land's ramshackledom,
There gloomy voices rise and fall,
Gloomy voices of yellow girls
Singing, singing of kingdom come.

Why must I hear such singing; why
Must I walk so ware of the world gone wry,
And why pale dog,
Unhappy dog, am I always I?

- Hagiwara Sakutaro
  translated by Graeme Wilson
  
I came across this poem in the December 1968 issue of Encounter, and I can never read it without reading it aloud. But this other translation is probably a more literal rendering of the poem:

Sad moonlit night

Drat that snatch-thief dog,
He howls at the moon from the rotting pier.
When the soul pricks up its ears,
It hears the shrill girls choiring,
Choiring
With their gloomy voices,
By the somber stone wall out at the pier.

Why is it always this way
with me?
Listen, you dog, you.
Tell me, you pale-blue, unhappy dog, you.

- Hagiwara Sakutaro

(I don't who the translator is for the second version.)

Graeme Wilson’s translations have been criticized, for taking "the creative role of the translator to the extreme, resulting in poems that only vaguely resemble Sakutarō’s originals" and I have no idea how much of Sakutaro am I reading and how much of Wilson. But then, I would never have come across Sakutaro at all if not for Graeme Wilson, and if I had come across the second version first, I wouldn't have been interested in reading more by or about Sakutaro.