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Travel Writings
"The travel writings of Matsuo Bashō are of enormous literary importance, and so it is a joy to see them collected in this compact volume, in translations of exemplary elegance, faithfulness, and accessibility. The annotations are especially they show a solid grasp of the author’s life, work, and times, and provide rich and detailed background information about allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics. Along with the high quality of the translations themselves, this thorough commentary makes the book a significant scholarly resource and will help readers appreciate the density and delicacy of Bashō’s writing. A very welcome addition to the English-language literature on one of the central poets of the Japanese tradition." —David B. Lurie, Columbia University
490 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
Matsuo Bashō
308 books600 followersKnown Japanese poet Matsuo Basho composed haiku, infused with the spirit of Zen.
The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_...
The renowned Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) during his lifetime of the period of Edo worked in the collaborative haikai no renga form; people today recognize this most famous brief and clear master.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_...
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 25, 2021
the translation of Narrow Road (Oku no hosomichi) is accessible to a broad audience, including undergrad classes. I also love having another translation of all of Basho's travel journals-- the first update of the whole body of works in a decade.
May 15, 2021
Que bello
May 14, 2026
Maravillosa, única y accesible edición de los diarios de viaje más importantes que escribió Bashō entre 1684 y 1691. Se trata de una edición confiable a cargo de Alberto Silva y Masateru Ito, con una traducción que es a la vez fiel, poética y amigable al lector moderno. El volumen incluye los siguientes diarios de viaje: Diario de una calavera a la intemperie (1684), Viaje a Kashima (1687), Cuaderno en la mochila (1687), Viaje a Sarashina (1687), Senda hacia Oku (1689) y Diario de Saga (1691). El más conocido y extenso es, por supuesto, Senda hacia Oku, cuya traducción si bien no alcanza los niveles poéticos de aquella hecha por Octavio Paz y Eikichi Hayashiya, sostiene el espíritu poético de Bashō, supera a la anterior en exactitud y claridad, e incluye todos los haikus originales en romaji. Es muy lindo también poder leer a Bashō en sus otros diarios de viaje: hay algunos fragmentos de Diario de una calavera a la intemperie y de Cuaderno en la mochila que son maravillosos, donde Bashō expone sus teorías estéticas sobre la composición poética, donde visita diversos lugares, vive episodios y escribe haikus (o hokkus) sobre lo que contempla. Amé el detalle de que el impulso inicial de muchos de sus viajes fuera algo tan simple y tan poético como ver la luna en cierto paisaje pacífico y remoto; ¿se imaginan viajar a pie cientos de kilómetros solo para ver la luna?
August 2, 2025
I had, of course, heard of the Japanese poet Bashō, but did not know that he chronicled the trips he made, mostly on foot, though sometimes on horseback and boat, around Japan from 1684 to 1689. I learned about them through a piece in the first issue of Emergence Magazine, which I, in turn, learned about from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, The Serviceberry, whose life began as an essay in, where else, Emergence Magazine.
The piece, a travelogue in which Fred Bahnson, notable author and director of the Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, retraces the pilgrimage that Christian mystic Thomas Merton took in 1968 to the American West, notes that “Six months before Merton would depart for California, he read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a series of travel sketches describing the pilgrimage Bashō undertook late in his life, a journey on foot over hundreds of miles. Opening himself to the elements, the aging poet carried little more than hat, staff, and satchel. Upon reading Bashō’s travel sketches, Merton wrote in his journal that he was completely shattered by them. ‘One of the most beautiful books I have ever read in my life.… Seldom have I found a book to which I responded so totally.’”
If cycling adventures largely consumed my thirties, and nearly half of my forties was obstructed by a couple of business-related (mis)adventures and a life-altering adjustment necessitated by the death of my mother, I have, since my mid-forties, turned to hiking as my primary recreational activity. I’ve hiked in places famous and not-so-famous, and, over the years, I have increasingly longed to set out on multi-day hiking trips. Inasmuch as I’m drawn to travel narratives generally, I jumped at the chance to read Bashō’s Travel Writings.
Travel Writings, translated and edited by Steven D. Carter, and published in 2020, contains all six of Bashō’s journeys, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North (herein titled “The Narrow Road through the Hinterlands”), along with a voluminous introduction, maps tracing Bashō’s routes, hundreds of footnotes that sometimes occupy nearly half the page, and appendices that account for more than a third of the book’s total length. This definitive edition may be the only book readers will need on Bashō’s travels, but I have to imagine it must be a far cry from what Merton read back in 1968.
Bashō didn’t invent the poetic travelogue, as Japan already had a rich history of travel writing and diaries. His mastery of the haibun, however, a form that combines prose and haiku, where the prose section typically sets a scene or narrative and the haiku offers a concise poetic distillation of the moment, elevated travel writing by infusing it with deep personal reflection, exquisite natural observations, and spiritual insight. It is these qualities that certainly moved Merton, and which I, too, was hoping to find. I did, but not as purely as I’d anticipated or hoped.
I appreciated Carter’s introduction, but then each journal had its own introduction, and then every page of Bashō’s journals themselves had so many footnotes, sometimes multiple in a single sentence, that the superscripts themselves became distracting. Endnotes would have helped create an uninterrupted flow to the book—after all, even if you’re trying to avoid the references, having them right there on the page makes it much harder than choosing to flip to the back—but all those citations were like gnats flitting around my face. In the end, this felt like a book designed to highlight Carter’s academic rigor rather than the artistry of Bashō’s writings—now, amazingly, more than three centuries old.
While Travel Writings might have come up short for me from an emotional standpoint, I don’t think Bashō is to blame, nor do I think Merton was overzealous in his assessment of the Bashō he read. What it did give me, however, was a new way to see travel writing, one in which I might one day craft my own blend of narrative and poetry to bring adventures to life. Since I’m on a kick of late of reading books twice, either back to back or in short order, I’ve already requested Penguin Classics’ The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which, given its publication date of 1966, is very likely what Merton read. I’m hoping, with that edition, I can find more of what he found, what very well may have been the inspiration for Merton to head west—a desire for direct awareness, bedrock, the undistilled center of our being in God, the pure drop—and what may inspire me to stop dreaming about hiking trips and start planning one.
The piece, a travelogue in which Fred Bahnson, notable author and director of the Food, Faith, & Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, retraces the pilgrimage that Christian mystic Thomas Merton took in 1968 to the American West, notes that “Six months before Merton would depart for California, he read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a series of travel sketches describing the pilgrimage Bashō undertook late in his life, a journey on foot over hundreds of miles. Opening himself to the elements, the aging poet carried little more than hat, staff, and satchel. Upon reading Bashō’s travel sketches, Merton wrote in his journal that he was completely shattered by them. ‘One of the most beautiful books I have ever read in my life.… Seldom have I found a book to which I responded so totally.’”
If cycling adventures largely consumed my thirties, and nearly half of my forties was obstructed by a couple of business-related (mis)adventures and a life-altering adjustment necessitated by the death of my mother, I have, since my mid-forties, turned to hiking as my primary recreational activity. I’ve hiked in places famous and not-so-famous, and, over the years, I have increasingly longed to set out on multi-day hiking trips. Inasmuch as I’m drawn to travel narratives generally, I jumped at the chance to read Bashō’s Travel Writings.
Travel Writings, translated and edited by Steven D. Carter, and published in 2020, contains all six of Bashō’s journeys, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North (herein titled “The Narrow Road through the Hinterlands”), along with a voluminous introduction, maps tracing Bashō’s routes, hundreds of footnotes that sometimes occupy nearly half the page, and appendices that account for more than a third of the book’s total length. This definitive edition may be the only book readers will need on Bashō’s travels, but I have to imagine it must be a far cry from what Merton read back in 1968.
Bashō didn’t invent the poetic travelogue, as Japan already had a rich history of travel writing and diaries. His mastery of the haibun, however, a form that combines prose and haiku, where the prose section typically sets a scene or narrative and the haiku offers a concise poetic distillation of the moment, elevated travel writing by infusing it with deep personal reflection, exquisite natural observations, and spiritual insight. It is these qualities that certainly moved Merton, and which I, too, was hoping to find. I did, but not as purely as I’d anticipated or hoped.
I appreciated Carter’s introduction, but then each journal had its own introduction, and then every page of Bashō’s journals themselves had so many footnotes, sometimes multiple in a single sentence, that the superscripts themselves became distracting. Endnotes would have helped create an uninterrupted flow to the book—after all, even if you’re trying to avoid the references, having them right there on the page makes it much harder than choosing to flip to the back—but all those citations were like gnats flitting around my face. In the end, this felt like a book designed to highlight Carter’s academic rigor rather than the artistry of Bashō’s writings—now, amazingly, more than three centuries old.
While Travel Writings might have come up short for me from an emotional standpoint, I don’t think Bashō is to blame, nor do I think Merton was overzealous in his assessment of the Bashō he read. What it did give me, however, was a new way to see travel writing, one in which I might one day craft my own blend of narrative and poetry to bring adventures to life. Since I’m on a kick of late of reading books twice, either back to back or in short order, I’ve already requested Penguin Classics’ The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which, given its publication date of 1966, is very likely what Merton read. I’m hoping, with that edition, I can find more of what he found, what very well may have been the inspiration for Merton to head west—a desire for direct awareness, bedrock, the undistilled center of our being in God, the pure drop—and what may inspire me to stop dreaming about hiking trips and start planning one.
June 14, 2017
Comment vous parler de cette oeuvre de Bashô à sa juste valeur, sans en dénigrer la profondeur?
Comment vous expliquer ce sentiment de sérénité?
Nozarashi kikô fait parti des "Sept journaux de voyage"
Si comme moi, vous n'êtes pas familiers avec les termes "Haïku" et "Haïga" : pas de panique. Les Haïkus sont des poèmes japonais composés de trois vers, ils sont subtils et ont pour optique la capture de certains moments clés. Les Haïga les accompagnent et sont généralement esquissés par l'auteur.
J'ai pris le temps de décortiquer l'introduction et la préface afin de glaner le plus d'informations. Ce sont deux parties vraiment intéressantes, petite biographie de Bashô (il a fondé sa propre école de poésie) et notions à retenir pour les débutants.
A travers ses notes, Bashô nous entraîne dans son périple et nous autorise à découvrir ses impressions et pensées. C'est un ouvrage qu'il faut prendre le temps de découvrir et d'apprécier. Le fait qu'il soit bilingue est ce qui m'a le plus plu, les Haïga sont un plus non négligeable, apportant une touche d'originalité et captivant le lecteur. Son format permet de l'emporter partout et de s'évader à n'importe quel moment de la journée. L'édition est superbe, si vous aimez les livres (ceux qui se collectionnent, les pépites!) et que vous voulez découvrir la poésie japonaise, je ne peux que vous le conseiller.
Comment vous expliquer ce sentiment de sérénité?
Nozarashi kikô fait parti des "Sept journaux de voyage"
Si comme moi, vous n'êtes pas familiers avec les termes "Haïku" et "Haïga" : pas de panique. Les Haïkus sont des poèmes japonais composés de trois vers, ils sont subtils et ont pour optique la capture de certains moments clés. Les Haïga les accompagnent et sont généralement esquissés par l'auteur.
J'ai pris le temps de décortiquer l'introduction et la préface afin de glaner le plus d'informations. Ce sont deux parties vraiment intéressantes, petite biographie de Bashô (il a fondé sa propre école de poésie) et notions à retenir pour les débutants.
A travers ses notes, Bashô nous entraîne dans son périple et nous autorise à découvrir ses impressions et pensées. C'est un ouvrage qu'il faut prendre le temps de découvrir et d'apprécier. Le fait qu'il soit bilingue est ce qui m'a le plus plu, les Haïga sont un plus non négligeable, apportant une touche d'originalité et captivant le lecteur. Son format permet de l'emporter partout et de s'évader à n'importe quel moment de la journée. L'édition est superbe, si vous aimez les livres (ceux qui se collectionnent, les pépites!) et que vous voulez découvrir la poésie japonaise, je ne peux que vous le conseiller.
November 19, 2016
https://comaujapon.wordpress.com/2016...
C’est un recueil à savourer, à grignoter petit à petit quand on a envie de s’évader, puisqu’en quelque sorte, on accompagne Bashô dans ses voyages et sa plume poétique nous fait découvrir de sublimes paysages et nous fait passer un moment très agréable.
C’est un recueil à savourer, à grignoter petit à petit quand on a envie de s’évader, puisqu’en quelque sorte, on accompagne Bashô dans ses voyages et sa plume poétique nous fait découvrir de sublimes paysages et nous fait passer un moment très agréable.
December 28, 2019
Un viaje a lo largo del Japón y sus rincones a través de la poesía y la naturaleza.
August 24, 2024
I'm glad I read it,
As summer wanderlust strikes.
I turn - as the leaves.
As summer wanderlust strikes.
I turn - as the leaves.
April 10, 2026
Gostei muito deste livro. Gostei mais deste do que de outros da mesma colecção. O livro ganhava muito em ter uma versão dos poemas haiku no original. As notas deviam ser mais focadas na interpretação do texto e menos nos nomes das personalidades que têm pouco interesse para o leitor de hoje, que vai ler esta tradução. A menos que seja um académico, mas nesse caso não vai ler este livro. No geral a colecção tem melhorado. A capa ficou excelente e a qualidade do livro é meritória. Agora é preciso melhorar também o interior.
April 12, 2026
La traduzione italiana non mi ha convinto.
Ho letto alcune poesia tradotte in portoghese decisamente più più interessanti.
La bellezza della semplicità, la bellezza della capacità di trasmettere un'immagine in poche scelte parole si perde quase totalmente nella versione italiana.
Ho letto alcune poesia tradotte in portoghese decisamente più più interessanti.
La bellezza della semplicità, la bellezza della capacità di trasmettere un'immagine in poche scelte parole si perde quase totalmente nella versione italiana.
June 13, 2022
As a scholarly work, it may be five stars. For me, the interest lay in learning about employment as a poet in mud 1600s in Japan. Sounds like it was surprisingly busy and fatiguing. Also the format of the poetry is intriguing; I'd like to learn more about its structure other than the seasonal references and references to prior well-known verses.
Read
July 28, 2022Read The Narrow Road through the Hinterlands.
January 2, 2022
COUP DE CŒUR ♥️
J’ADORE LES HAÏKUS, encore un coup de cœur qui me rappel à quel point j’aime les recueils de poèmes et surtout les haïkus ❤️
J’ADORE LES HAÏKUS, encore un coup de cœur qui me rappel à quel point j’aime les recueils de poèmes et surtout les haïkus ❤️
October 7, 2023
Bones Bleaching in the Fields and the Saga diary were my favourites. Particularly enjoyed all the details Carter gives around Bashō and his travels.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews