A fallen blossom
returning to its branch?
No — a butterfly.
— Moritake · AI translation
The original
rakka eda ni / kaeru to mireba / kochō kana
That is the source, in romaji. It is printed here rather than kept in a footnote because the English above is machine-made, not a scholar’s, and you should be able to check it against something rather than take it on trust.
The rendering follows the sense rather than forcing 5-7-5. Japanese counts on rather than syllables, and the two do not line up; padding a translation out to fit the English shape is how you end up with a poem the poet did not write.
Arakida Moritake 1473–1549
A Shinto priest at the Ise Shrine, and the earliest poet in this collection by well over a century. He worked in haikai when it was still comic linked verse, before anything like Bashō’s seriousness had been brought to it.
Why this is here at all
HaikuMail is a Chrome extension that hides your inbox behind a search-only reader, and holds the first thirty seconds with a poem. This is one of the 157 it draws from. That is the rest of the story.