The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH AND OTHER TRAVEL SKETCHES / MATSUO BASHŌ

★★★★★

Having just read Steven D. Carter’s translation of Matsuo Bashō’s travel writings, given the somewhat predictably straightforward title Travel Writings, and finding the package, on the whole, overly dry and academic, I immediately requested The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, originally published by Penguin Classics in 1966. This was the version that likely set Christian mystic Thomas Merton on his pilgrimage to the American West in 1968, and it was what I had hoped to find but did not in Carter’s 2020 translation. I had a similar disappointing experience when I read Brook Ziporyn’s 2023 translation of the Daodejing compared to John H. McDonald’s 2022 translation of the Tao Te Ching. What I’m saying is: While all translations may be valid, not all translations work equally for all readers. For every person who prefers the translations by Carter and Ziporyn, there is another who is more moved by those of McDonald and Nobuyuki Yuasa, the translator of the book at hand.

Yuasa, in his opening acknowledgements, begins, “To translate from one language into another is a fearsome task. It is a fitting punishment for that human pride which led to the great confusion of languages. When the present work was but begun some three years ago, a friend of mine who happened to see me labouring over it, remarked in an innocent manner that I was attempting an impossibility. It is, therefore, with a great deal of humility and self-reproach that I am now sending the work to the press.” Not to say that Carter didn’t approach his task in translating Bashō with humility and self-reproach, but I found Yuasa’s words both comforting and, counterintuitively, confident, perhaps because they reminded me of how I often feel about my own poetry.

Because I wrote at length in my review of Travel Writings, I’ll forgo repeating myself here. It is enough to say that, in this translation, I found everything Merton found, which is to say, I found everything I was looking for. Suffuse with beauty and lyricism and longing and loneliness and tenderness, Bashō’s collected travel writings herein, “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton,” “A Visit to the Kashima Shrine,” “The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel,” “A Visit to Sarashina Village,” and “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” are journeys within journeys, opening us to the possibility of presence, of attendance, of living in and for the moment, of unknowing and the unknowable, of fearlessness (or, at least, of not succumbing to fear as a barrier to action), and, crucially, of possibility itself. That is, the possibility of possibility—something, sadly, I think, is lacking, for reasons both expected and less so, in many of our narratives today. Bashō is a reminder that, despite everything, we can find beauty in ourselves, in each other, and in the world we inhabit, and we can spread and radiate that beauty outward: Ripples of beauty can become waves of beauty can become tsunamis of beauty. Why, oh why, don’t more of us want to live in that world?

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