More Translations from the Chinese

Translations by Arthur Waley

NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
MCMXIX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
PRINTED BY THE VAIL-BALLOU CO., BINGHAMTON, N.Y. ON WARREN’S INDIA TINT OLD STYLE PAPER BOUND BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS


This book is not intended to be representative of Chinese literature as a whole. I have chosen and arranged chronologically various pieces which interested me and which it seemed possible to translate adequately.
T‘ien-kung sun warm, pagoda door open; Alone climbing, greet Spring, drink one cup. Without limit excursion-people afar-off wonder at me; What cause most old most first arrived!
While many of the pieces in “170 Chinese Poems” aimed at literary form in English, others did no more than give the sense of the Chinese in almost as crude a way as the two examples above. It was probably because of this inconsistency that no reviewer treated the book as an experiment in English unrhymed verse, though this was the aspect of it which most interested the writer.