China and the West

Tietjens, Eunice. From China . Chinese poems in English rhyme by Ts'ai T'ing-kan : review [ID D32292].
Lovers of Chinese poetry will welcome this book, not because the translations are masterpieces, for they are hardly that, but because the book as a whole is so extraordinarily civilized, and suited to the content of the poems themselves. Partly the charm lies in the beautiful physical make-up, which gives on each page, above the English translation, the original Chinese text in satisfying black characters ; partly it lies in the sense of the personality of the translator in introduction and notes, the distinguished admiral and diplomat Ts'ai T'ing-Kan, whose background is a combination of the ancient Chinese classical education and a college curriculum in America. Even the delightfully sly Chinese humor is here, in a sober-seeming reprinting, 'less the Chinese periods of history may mean but little to the Western reader', of a list of the kings of England at the time of the T'ang dynasty. As the admiral points out, during the first two centuries of the T'ang there 'was no mention of the kings in England'.
The poems translated are all quatrains of the T'ang Dynasty from an anthology of the period. With a number of them I am familiar in other translations, but many are, I believe, new in English. The translations themselves, while few of them are magical, are exact and scholarly and quite capable of passing on to us pleasure in the originals. They are at their best, I think, in those poems which call for a certain sprightliness and humor. Altogether Admiral Ts'ai, the first Chinese who has attempted such a translation, has done a surprisingly good job.