here’s another retread from last January, slightly added and with a new installment at the end:
The Narrow Road: I know of no finer use of Internet technology to illuminate “foreign” literatures than this site devoted to Basho Matsuo’s Oku no hosomichi (”The Narrow Road to the Deep North”), the ne plus ultra of travel literature. The site is created and maintained by Stephen Kohl, professor of Japanese at the University of Oregon, and the primary English translation is by Yuasa Nobuyuki (and is also in print as a Penguin Classic.) I say “primary translation” because four other English versions are available at the site as well. Basho’s masterwork consists of 44 short chapters, each of convenient length for a webpage, and links on each page take the reader to her choice of four other renditions of the same chapter. In addition, a link to the Japanese text is provided. We can, for example, compare the following versions of Basho’s opening lines:
Days and months are the travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.
Yuasa
The passing days and months are eternal travellers in time. The years that come and go are travellers too.
Dorothy Britton
Moon & sun are passing figures of countless generations, and years coming or going wanderers too.
Corman & Susume
The sun and the moon are eternal voyagers; the years that come and go are travelers too.
Helen Craig McCollough
The months and days are the wayfarers of the centuries and as yet another year comes round, it, too, turns traveler.
Earl Miner
A link tells us that the word variously translated “eternity, in time, generations, voyagers” is an allusion to the Chinese poet Li Bai (Li Po), and the online commentary gives provides the quote:
The heavens and the earth, all the cosmos, dwell in the realm of change. Light and darkness, the sun and the moon, likewise, are eternal travellers. This floating world is but a dream and all human pleasures are fleeting.
No title given, but another Basho site at Stonebridge Press translates the lines as
Heaven and earth are the inn for all things, the light and shadow the traveler of a hundred generations. Accordingly, this floating life is just like a dream
and tells us that it’s from the preface to “Holding a Banquet in the Peach and Pear Garden on a Spring Night” (a poem that, so far as I can determine, is not on the web in any of the major Western European languages.)
If you’re into these kinds of details, there’s another interesting passage towards the end of the Prologue, where Basho describes his preparations for the trip. Britton’s translation:
So I mended my breeches, put new cords on my hat . . .
Yuasa renders this “mending my torn trousers, tying a new strap to my hat” and McCullough has “I had mended my torn trousers, put a new cord on my hat”; nothing noteworthy there. But then Miner’s translation is
I mended my underpants, re-corded my rain hat . . .
Underpants!?! Wassup widdat? Fortuitously, Corman and Susume relieve our perplexity (or perhaps compound it) by leaving the two main nouns in the sentence in Japanese:
. . . mending a rip in my momohiki, replacing the cords in my kasa . . .
Now momohiki, in contemporary Japanese, is the word for “long johns,” (literally “the things one pulls on over one’s thighs.”) Which, I guess, would be a reasonable thing to take along if you were headed for the Deep North.
(BTW, I imagine that kasa refers specifically to those big straw hats shaped like flat cones, since nowadays it’s the word for “umbrella.”)
added 08/03/2005:
Since I’m fixing to head out on the road for a couple of days, it seems appropriate to continue Basho’s journey as well. Stage two is called Idetatsu, “departure.” Of the translations available on the U. of Oregon site, the one by Corman and Susume is striking for the way it reproduces the syntax of the Japanese much more closely than do the others. Makes it read more like free verse than standard English prose, but I think it works. Here’s the whole thing:
Yayoi: Last seventh, slightly hazy dawn, “a waning moon, a failing light,”summit of Fuji vague, crowns of blossoming cherry at Ueno and Yanaka, when would they - and would they - be seen again? Friends, gathering since nightfall, came along by boat to see us off. Landed at Senju, sense of three thousand li ahead swelling the heart, world so much a dream, tears at point of departure.departing spring (ya)
birds cry fishes’
eyes tears
The yatate’s first words, the path taken looked not to advance at all. Those filling the way behind watched till only shadows of backs seemed seen.
No time for a gloss on the Japanese; I’m out the door.
Post a Comment