My guide congratulated me by saying that I was indeed fortunate to have crossed the mountains in safety, for accidents of some sort had always happened to him on past trips. The journeys are filled with days of rain, floods and difficult passes through mountains requiring the author to hire a guide: In my own country a horse with some money would be straight down to the fair, frolicking with the fillies or casting a glad eye at the stallions depending on its inclinations. Once Basho borrows one from a farmer and sends it back with some money tied to the saddle. I also learnt that Japanese horses are trustworthy. It reminds me oddly of Heinrich Heine in the Harz or up by the North Sea. There is the type of hunger that you can feel in the legs to see distant places.
The group of poets waiting in a spinney on a cloudy night watching for the moon to rise over the trees in order to compose verse amuses me still.
Basho accompanied by apprentices stops at these places, met up with others and they aim to write poems by the moonlight. There are famous views, historical places, mountains, bays, flowers, trees about which poems have been written. It was, on the other hand, an incurable folly of mine to think that, had I come here in autumn, I would have had a greater poetic success, for that only proved the poverty of my mind. Some of their poems are included too.įor Basho the landscape is rich in culture: It was by a singular stroke of genius that an ancient writer pointed out that the autumn was the best season to visit this beach, for it seemed to me that the scene excelled in loneliness and isolation at that season. Basho aimed to combine poetry and prose, he had a reputation as a poet and was accompanied at different stages by, well, I suppose wandering apprentice poets attempting to hone their craft by hanging about with a mastercraftsman, some notable wordsmith or other. Deep Road to the Narrow North is the longest at forty-six printed pages.
The translation contains five travel sketches.
Even while I was getting ready.I was already dreaming of the full moon rising over the islands of Matsushima. The gods seemed to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home. No sooner had the spring mist begun to rise over the field than I wanted to be on the road again to cross the barrier-gate of Shirakawa in due time. Naturally I never did get my hands on the modern book but at my local library there was the penguin translation of Basho's book. It was about a travel book in which the author retraced the footsteps of Matsuo Basho's journey through seventeenth century Japan told in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. A long time ago I read a book review in the newspaper.
0 kommentar(er)
