Customer Reviews

BACK ROADS TO FAR TOWNS: BASHO'S OKU NO HOSOMICHI

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There are perhaps half a dozen English versions of this, Basho's most famous "travel journal"--the Oku no hosomichi--currently available. If you have not read this version, you may justifiably wonder how this could be considered one of the two pillars of Japanese literature (with The Tale of Genji).

Translating the haiku in this work is devilishly difficult. I don't believe that Corman has delivered the goods 100% of the time, but his are still the best versions available, overall.

In the meantime, Corman is the only one who has managed to create in English prose something that remotely resembles the prose of the Japanese text. Basho did NOT write ordinary Japanese prose, so any translation into English that sounds like something you might hear on commercial radio or TV, or reads like a current novel by you-name-it, is woefully inadequate.

Corman's version has been slighted by others, claiming that it "sounds like Corman's own poems" (it does not) or it's written "as if Jack Kerouac went on the journey". (This last is amazing, as I cannot think of a style more distant from Kerouac in contemporary American English.)

Rather, Corman has tried to let the unique toughness and terseness of Basho's language cross the translation barrier.

This translation is closer to Basho than any other I've seen, and I've read probably just about every English translation of it ever published in an edition of 500 or more--and the original.

Kudos to Robert Hass for seeing it back into print!

Released in 1968 by Grossman ("a Mushinsha Limited Book"), translated by Corman and Kamaike Susumu with illustrations by Hayakawa. Trade paperback with French flaps, 143 pp.

English and Japanese side-by-side with Preface, Pronunciation Guide, 15 pp of historical/literary End Notes, and a map.

I want to know about Sabi in Oku no hoshomichi. But i cant'n reat about it anywhere. Can you help me?