This is a collection of translations from the Chinese done down the years solely to please myself. It is offered with no pretense to scholarship or to mastery of that complex subject, Sinology. I have translated the pieces I enjoyed reading and I have enjoyed translating them, so I hope readers will find them enjoyable.
We are often told that the Chinese seldom write love poems. This is not true. From the beginning in The Book of Odes, the Shi Ching, there is a great deal of Chinese love poetry. True, the Confusion scholar gentry were given to the amusing and ingenuous habit of interpreting these poems as political allegories, but they obviously are not. Even the English title of the collection is misleading. It should be The Folk Song Classic. Each dynasty has made collections of folk songs, most of them love songs, and the literary poets have written imitations of them. A large proportion of the poems in this book of mine are song poems and many of them are love poems.
Now that I have put them all together and read them over I realize that they need no explanatory introduction and only biographical notes. I have avoided poems with references to Chinese historical and literary figures or to Chinese customs and beliefs unknown in the West. I have tried to keep the transliteration of Chinese names simple and uniform, using the modified Wade system commonly used in America. This is not Chinese, of any period, but it will do. Vowels are pronounced as in Italian: ai is English “i”, ei is “a”, ou is “ow”. Ch’ t’, k’, ts’, p’, tz’ may be pronounced as spelled, but rather sharply. Without apostrophe, ch is pronounced “dj”; k is pronounced “g”; p is pronounced “b”;t is pronounced “d”; hs is a palatalized “sh”; j is “r.” E before “n” or ng is a mute “u.” In Ise or tzu the vowel scarcely exists. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, is pronounced something like “Lowds.” The Chinese Book of Changes. I Ching, sometimes spelled “Yi King”, is pronounced, using American spelling, “ee jing.” The “Yi King” is a relic of the extremely misleading orthography invented by Max Müller for The Sacred Books of the East. German transliteration is much like the Wade. The French have several incongruous systems inconsistently used.
The literature of Chinese poetry in translation must have doubled in volume in the last fifteen years. The scholarship, the accuracy, and the understanding of Chinese critical values and literary references have vastly improved. As poetry, no recent translations can compare with those of Ezra Pound, Judith Gautier, Klabund, Witter Bynner or Amy Lowell, none of whom knew very much about the subject or understood the language. Most modern collections do have extensive introductions, notes and bibliography as well as clear explanations of the forms and esthetics of Chinese poetry. I hope this book will stimulate the reader to read everything he can get his hands on. My book is only a sample; it is limited to a few kinds of poetry, mostly poems of love, reverie, and meditation in the midst of nature. I do hope these are poems in their own right.
Like the Three Hundred Poems of T’ang and other Far Eastern anthologies, this “Hundred Poems” contains a few more for good measure and good luck.
K.R.