![]() Certainly, his essays include conventional moments of travelers’ tales, narrating the places he visits in what sometimes sounds almost like a seventeenth-century tourist. They seem more a poetic vision of travel experiences. Travel for Bashō, explains Yuasa, culminated a period of casting away the material things of life, so that the poet might “restore his true identity (what he calls the ‘everlasting self which is poetry’…).”īashō’s travel sketches are neither travel accounts nor poetry collections in the conventional sense. The chronological arrangement of the narratives offers a portrait of the poet’s development as traveler and narrator over the decade of his journeys between 16. The combination of travel and poetry intrigued me, so I picked up a copy of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.Ī helpful introduction by translator Nobuyuki Yuasa situates Bashō’s travels in his long poetic career as well as in the longer tradition of Japanese poetry. ![]() I first learned about the travel sketches of seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō from a comment in an interview. ![]()
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