zilcrino

In Lojban. The joke of the haiku is that it is virtually untranslatable. “Zilcrino” means something like “green thing for which greenness is not an applicable concept” (not my invention, a classic Lojban reference to Noam Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas”). “Ge’ecu’idai” means “you must feel (dai) an unspecified emotion (ge’e) to a neutral degree (cu’i).” My interpretive translation into an English haiku (not at all close to the original): “Your Ideal of green/no longer understands you./But what do you care?” The month of composition has been lost, but I have documented that the year was 2001.