Haiku Journeys

It was the summer of 1998 and I decided to spend my holiday retracing part of Matsuo Basho's journey to northern Japan. Granted, I was not the first person to be inspired by reading his timeless travelogue Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to Oku), nor would I be the last. Lesley Downer chronicled her own literary pilgrimage in 1989's On the Narrow Road to the Deep North and Howard Norman joined photographer Michael Yamashita on a similar trip featured in the February 2008 edition of National Geographic. Countless others have made the same trip without publishing a word about it, no doubt drawn by the same suggestive descriptions and exceptional haiku Basho shared about his travels with his companion Sora.

Kodansha's edition of the book, translated by Donald Keene and illustrated by Miyata Masayuki, was the first I read and it remains my preferred English version (the parallel Japanese text is provided as well). Miyata's drawings have a cartoonish (read: manga) quality that never cross over into a sense of childishness because of the poignancy with which he depicts scenes of detailed subjects presented against spare backgrounds. Keene's scholarship is evident in both the unadorned prose translation and the artistic interpretations of the poems. Their efforts were so effective that they provided me with the impetus for two trips. The first was a trip to his hometown of Iga Ueno in Mie Prefecture in December 1997. The second was the aforementioned trip north.

Between Basho's own account and those of others who have followed him, I see no real need to give a full account of my own trip. What I would like to do is take a closer look at some of the haiku he wrote and the places he wrote them. Seeing the locales firsthand inspired me to attempt my own translations of certain poems. I'll offer them here alongside respected scholar Donald Keene's own approximations for your consideration. To my surprise, I was also motivated to attempt some haiku of my own, which seemed adequate enough to share here. Lest it seem presumptuous to place one of my own efforts beside those of a master's, it should be mentioned that Basho described gatherings in which he composed series of linked verse with enthusiasts far less talented than himself, occasionally sharing the efforts of others in his journals.

April 26 Haiku Journey: Yamadera

May 1 Haiku Journey: Haguro-san

May 8 Haiku Journey: Yudono-san

May 15 Haiku Journey: Sado Island

May 22: Haiku Journey: Iga Ueno