Hello world!

Welcome to backcountryways.xyz, the Bod Library’s new wing for our most up-to-date translation* of Basho’s classic trail-book, oku no hosomichi, here titled backcountry ways.

  • [Former versions were published  as Narrow Road through the Backcountry in two editions of The Bedford Anthology of World Literature (2003, 2007).]

Because our older website & domain name for Basho materials is legacy-bound to a host account Bod Library doesn’t manage, all the content has been copied to this closely related site on a domain host-account we do, which will henceforth receive all new edits & improvements going forward.

Note that site materials fall into the following main categories:
1. oku translation, passage by passage from Basho’s original;
2. companion’s trail-guide, passage notes at various levels of detail & depth, with transliteration & alternative translations of verses;
3. glossary, with discussion of key terms, concepts & forms;
4. Basho & beyond, essays on the art of translation–.  

To coordinate trail guide materials (in category #2) with the relevant passages (in #1), visitors may find it useful to open the website twice, once for each, whether to set pages side by side or toggle back & forth.

Guide materials are organized from the most basic & immediately relevant to sense of the passage to the more advanced, nuanced & sophisticated discussion of underlying aesthetic, cultural & philosophical frameworks. New trail-takers may well enjoy a clearer sense of the work’s flow by leaving the more detailed notes for subsequent visits.

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As discussed in the Introduction, Basho can be considered one of the all-time great poets, travelers, guides, multi-media artists, literary innovators, &  (arguably most of all) teachers. In the case of the work at hand, he is all of these–& more, including game-player, trickster, & most of all friend. Part of his genius is a light touch, often twinkling, sometimes humorous, sometimes as if sketching with light from within.

Looking back at my own experience of Basho in translation over the last sixty years or so, I’m amazed at how much value came across even the worst & most un-Basho-like versions initially available. Almost from the beginning, I faced two translation challenges: one how to more faithfully render what he’d actually offered; the second, how to apply the principles he taught mainly by examples to new work (my own &/or by students).

He himself had warned against superficial imitation ………
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[to be continued….–6/ 6. 2022]
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even Basho found
the way surprisingly looped
–back to go forward

(nothing to do but
persevere–one step ahead
of the one behind)