PLAYS OF OLD JAPAN: THE “NŌ”
By MARIE C. STOPES and
PROFESSOR JOJI SAKURAI
PREFACE by BARON KATO
The Times says: “The Sumida River is a little play which, even in translation, one feels to be of great beauty and intolerable pathos. Dr. Stopes has written a lucid and serviceable introduction on the ‘Nō’ plays, which deserve the study of every student of the drama.”
The Morning Post says: “The translators have chosen a rhythmic, simple, irregular verse, which isolates just that element of pure tragedy that underlies the native literary crust of ornament.... We are convinced that drawing-room and library will welcome her to their hearts.”
T.P.’s Weekly says: “We advise all who care for the drama to read this book. The effect may be compared to that of having the best work of Synge with an added national and religious interest.”
The Spectator says: “Dr. Stopes has made the ‘Nō’ and their history for the first time accessible to the ordinary reader ... there is pleasure to be got from them even by those who only read a translation of the poems.”
The Times (New York) says: “Dr. Stopes has placed the English reader under a debt of gratitude by her work on these exquisite lyric plays.”
The Athenæum says: “The author’s vivid and imaginative sympathy has really enabled her in some degree to communicate the incommunicable.”
W. HEINEMANN. 5/- net.
MAN
OTHER POEMS & A PREFACE
BY
MARIE C. STOPES, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.S.L. Fellow of University College, London.
“The title-poem, wherein is set forth with thoughtful earnestness and no little grace of language the changing aspects of man to the eyes of ripening womanhood, and ‘The Brother,’ a ‘true and unvarnished’ tragedy, deriving force from the very homeliness of its telling, stand out most clearly in a volume of which the dominating qualities are clearness of vision and a distinctive point of view.”—The Athenæum.
“Dr. Stopes is by calling a fossil botanist, and her scientific training gives restraint and substance to all her verse. This is particularly noticeable in the longish poem which opens the book, tracing the changing image which man assumes in the mind of a growing girl—a difficult theme well treated from the personal point of view, and in graceful measured phrase. But there is no lack of emotion in her pages; she sings with enthusiasm of the joy of married love; and sometimes in a minor key of regret for old, dead loves. Her highest level, we think, is reached in ‘Tokio Snow’—a beautiful fancy expressed in stanzas which have a curious but very successful rhyme-scheme, and ‘Human Love,’ an impressive moment of spiritual reflection on the theme ‘Amantium irae.’”—The Times.
W. HEINEMANN. 3/6 net.
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