A Basho Haiku Question

[ika_squid]

Kon'nichiwa. I just joined about a half hour ago! One of Basho's haiku can be translated as the following:
Old pond
Frog jumps in
Splash

However, I have found the Japanese to be rather obscure. Before long, I found the following:
Furuike ya
Kowazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

But when I tried translating it, I back translated the results to the following:
Furui ike
Kowazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

http://japan.chez.tiscali.fr/Culture/Japan/Haiku6.htm (one of two sites disagreeing with the first-shown Japanese romaji in this post) shows the following:
Furui ike ya
Kowazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto

But the first line here appears to have one mora too many. I don't know why the 'ya' is there either. Could someone please aid me in this translatory dilemma?
Thanks for any help.
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[zengargoyle]

you might also want to check here http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/text/view/1 for some more translations.

古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音

i think the や is a form of the sentence ending particle よ. so it emphasizes the fact of the old pond as new information not known to the listener. "so, there's this old pond. a frog jumps in... splash!".

[clay]

古池や is furu ike ya and not furui ike ya (since there can only be 5 sounds for the first line).

[ika_squid]

But 'furu' doesn't mean 'old', does it?

[mandolin]

I can really only point to a song on this one for reference...

Ookina Furudokei (Hirai Ken)

Means: "The big, old clock"

My japanese penpal concurrs, that the 'i' ending of the adjective is sometimes dropped when prefixed to a noun like that.

[clay]

-i adjectives when combined with nouns, the -i can be dropped.

青い空 aoi sora - a blue sky
But you can say:
青空 ao zora - blue skies

You can see the sound 's' changes to 'z'. I guess the difference between the two is when you drop the 'i' it really becomes one word. In fact, 青空 is in many dictionaries as a word.

[ika_squid]

Okay, that explains things. Thanks everyone.