"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise..."

There is an often quoted poem by a famous Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō which is translated to English in either of two ways:

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

or

Do not follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

However word-by-word literal translation from Japanese is:

Do not seek the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

Question: I wonder how much "to seek to follow in the footsteps" changes the meaning from simple "to follow in the footsteps", in what way and even if the phrase "seek to follow" is linguistically correct?

The majority of results when googling the phrase "to seek to follow in the footsteps" points to this poem and that makes me a little bit suspicious that a compromise has been made between adhering to the Japanese wording and having to create a comprehensible sentence in English.

This is subjective of course, but I think the first translation captures the meaning better than the second.

If the most efficient path to the goal sought by the wise is to take the same path that they took, this would be expressly forbidden by the second translation.

However, I also think the literal translation is both the clearest in meaning and the most poetic.

How about this:

Do not seek the path the wise took; instead, seek what they sought.