HaikuMail

The autumn mountains,

and here and there

smoke going up.

Gyōdai · AI translation

The original

aki no yama / tokorodokoro ni / kemuri tatsu

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.

Katō Gyōdai 1732–1792

Of the Nagoya school, and part of the same eighteenth-century revival of Bashō’s manner that Buson led from Kyoto.

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.