Session 22: Sabi / mono no aware: Bashō's Narrow Road to the Interior

Topics

❖ Aesthetic term: sabi
❖ Matsuo Bashō's Narrow Road of the Interior (1694, Oku no hosomichi 奥の細道)

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

Narrow Road of the Interior goes under many English titles because it has been translated over and over. Narrow Road might strike you as a plain and simple text. It is not. It is also one of the most famous of premodern texts, together with Pillow Book, Tale of Genji, Tale of Heike and probably Essays in Idleness.

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Narrow Road to the Interior (in McCullough) Try to read with care all of it. If this just seems impossible (it is sort of like reading a lot of poetry all at once) then begin the carefully reading with Matsushima and continue through Echigo Province (where he writes a poem about ladies of pleasure). The lecture will make little sense if you have not read ahead of time.
✓ For readings on sabi see the previous session's schedule. Review.

Multimedia notes

❖ I showed some ikebana flower arrangements that seem "sabi" in some way. I read aloud from two different other translations of Bashō, both excellent. One was by Donald Keene. The other was by David Barnhill. I also showed the Sado Island poem (araumi ya) in Bashō's own hand as well as the first page of the autograph of Narrow Road discovered after the Kobe earthquake.

Links

⇢ None.

Other

Terms and such mentioned this day that are not otherwise in an obvious place on the web site, the powerpoints, the assigned reading, etc. (to help with capturing items mentioned, perhaps quickly, in class, not for test purposes)

None, but the sections covered in class are Hiraizumi, Sado island, the traveling women, and Ryushakuji (the famous cicada haiku, shizukasa ya ...) although this last one was not covered in Fall 2011.