otterno11's review
3.0
After visiting the historic temple and temple ruins at Hiraizumi on a trip to Japan in 2015, I was definitely interested in reading some of Basho's famous poetry. Having not read haiku, I was definitely interested in reading through this poetic travel memoir and revisiting my own voyage to Japan’s deep north.
The local library had only A Haiku Journey, which included some of Basho’s most famous haiku in addition to the The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Dorothy Britten and accompanied by photographs taken during the 1970s by Dennis Stock. The photos were nice but a little dated, and I felt that Britten’s translations, which did not include the original Japanese, seemed a little affected, including alien rhyming schemes that would have no relation to the original Japanese. I will have to look for another English edition of Basho’s verse. In any case, it was interesting to see this traveler taking stock of his visit to this eight hundred year old location some three hundred years before I too visited. Read more about this and other books I read inspired by my trip to Japan at my blog, Reading Rainstorm.
The local library had only A Haiku Journey, which included some of Basho’s most famous haiku in addition to the The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Dorothy Britten and accompanied by photographs taken during the 1970s by Dennis Stock. The photos were nice but a little dated, and I felt that Britten’s translations, which did not include the original Japanese, seemed a little affected, including alien rhyming schemes that would have no relation to the original Japanese. I will have to look for another English edition of Basho’s verse. In any case, it was interesting to see this traveler taking stock of his visit to this eight hundred year old location some three hundred years before I too visited. Read more about this and other books I read inspired by my trip to Japan at my blog, Reading Rainstorm.
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