A continuation of the post I had before on haiku poetry by on Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉). These were both featured in the children’s TV show Nihongo de asobo, which is a nice Japanese TV program for kids.
Disclaimer: These translations are my own amateur efforts, and should not be considered professional translations at all. Please use at your own risk. 
夏草や （なつくさや, natsu kusa ya）
兵どもが （つわものどもが, tsuwamono domo ga）
夢の跡 （ゆめのあと, yume no ato）
To me, I would translate this as “Summer grass is all that remains of a soldier’s dreams”, which has a clearly Buddhist message about impermanence, but also about the end result of ambitions, violence and so on. The や (ya) at the end of the first line is a kind of “filler” syllable sometimes used by haiku authors for dramatic pause (and maybe to achieve the 5-syllable requirement 
).
閑やさ （しずかやさ, shizukayasa）
岩にしみ入る （いわにしみいる, iwa ni shimi iru）
蝉の声 （せみのこえ, semi no koe）
This one evokes a nice feeling of late summer or early autumn. I would translate this one as “Peace: a silverfish crawls into a rock, the sound of cicadas”. The word しみ, according to the online dictionary, refers to silverfish insects, and cicadas are famous insects who make loud buzzing noises during the warmer months when they come out of hiding. In Japan, it’s common for kids to go “bug collecting” in the summer, looking for things like cicadas and rhinoceros beetles.
Enjoy!
This blog is the reflection of my efforts to explore fatherhood, Buddhism and my love of Japanese culture. Anything useful I can pass along makes the Internet hopefully a better place.
In the second poem, I think that ‘shimihairu’ is really 染み入る. My copy of the Nelson dictionary says this is equivalent to 染み込む ‘to soak in.’ So, ‘the sound (‘voices’) of the cicadas soaks into (penetrates?) the stones.’
Also, for 閑 I didn’t find the pronunciation ‘shizuka,’ but the meaning is leisure or free time. So perhaps the idea is a hot, lazy afternoon, just sitting around doing nothing while the sound of the cicadas seems powerful enough to soak into the stones. I don’t know if Japanese cicadas are actually louder than their North American counterparts, but they seem to be. By the way, in Kansas City, we called them locusts. And the local lore suggested that when you hear the locusts, it is ‘six weeks ’til frost.’
Hi Johnl,
Apologies for late reply (hectic week, still no Internet), but thanks for the additional information. The pronunciation is correct for 閑 as I was able to find it in the dictionary. It was also on the show itself, so I recorded as-is, but I assume it’s something obscure, as I couldn’t find it easily on online dictionaries until I got the query just right. :-p
Thanks for the folklore too from Kansas. Good stuff.