on a leafless branch

a few years ago, i posted a fairly comprehensive collection of basho's crow haiku translations to my old blog. here is a new entry from an interesting recent collection by takafumi saito and william r. nelson, 1020 haiku in translation: the heart of basho, buson and issa

on a leafless branch
a crow -
autumn dusk.

i like the saito/nelson collection because of its excellent selection of poetry though i am a bit surprised by some of the unusual, at times ESL-like phrasing in its translations. for example:

the first snow
at a hermitage
happily i am.