Travel writing

The traveller tells what he has seen, and the line between observation and invention remains shifting. Ibn Battuta dictated his travels in Fez in 1355 to a scholar of the court, and no one knows whether he had taken notes; the diary of his companion Sora shows that Bashō often departs from the facts in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. A postal inspector measures the distances and the mule trade from Buenos Aires to Lima, and a Togolese man goes to live among the Inuit of Greenland, turning the explorers' gaze around. Cinema enters with a Salesian missionary who filmed the Shuar of the Amazon in 1926, and with the twelve minutes Peter Kubelka drew from a safari.

works 12

• NarrativeEldad the Daniteספר אלדד הדניEldad ha-Dani · 880Account of a ninth-century Jewish traveller who claimed to have come from a kingdom of the lost tribes in eastern Africa, and brought back from it unknown laws.Literature
• NarrativeThe Travels of Ibn Battutaرحلة ابن بطوطةIbn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy · 1355The account of a jurist from Tangier on the Muslim world of the fourteenth century, dictated in Fez on his return and set down in writing by a scholar of the Marinid court.Literature
• PoetryThe Narrow Road to the Deep North奥の細道Matsuo Bashō · 1702Account of a five-month walk towards the north of the country in 1689, alternating prose and very short poems.Literature
• NarrativeEl Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers between Buenos Aires and LimaEl lazarillo de ciegos caminantesAlonso Carrió de la Vandera · 1775In the time of the Bourbon reforms, the great postal road of colonial Peru, seen by the agent of the Crown charged with reforming it.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetrySayohatnomaMuqimiy · 1900not translated into EnglishThe Fergana Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, under Russian administration, where travel is on foot or on horseback.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeБаёноти сайёҳи ҳиндӣAbdurauf Fitrat · 1912not translated into EnglishA Bukharan student settled in Istanbul writes to awaken the emirate, which the Jadid reformists want to modernise.Literature
• DocumentaryLos invencibles shuaras del Alto AmazonasCarlos Crespi Croci · 1927A Salesian missionary and his camera among the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, in 1926.Cinema
• NarrativePeople TalkЉуди говореRastko Petrović · 1931A short narrative of 1931 in which a traveller who has landed on an island in a lake does nothing but listen to the local people.Literature
• NovelOn the RoadJack Kerouac · 1957A barely fictionalised account of real journeys, the novel made its author the voice of a generation that he himself had named Beat.Literature
• CinemaOur Trip to AfricaUnsere AfrikareisePeter Kubelka · 1966Twelve minutes drawn from a filmed safari, in which the pairing of sound and image makes the travellers say what they did not say.Cinema
• NarrativeAn African in GreenlandL'Africain du GroenlandTété-Michel Kpomassie · 1980A Togolese man who went to live among the Inuit of Greenland, and who turns the explorers' gaze around.Literature
• NarrativeRunning in the FamilyMichael Ondaatje · 1982A writer's return to the island of his childhood, listening to the stories his family still tells itself.Literature