Arthur Waley

“ They say a Holy Dragon lives there, whom men have never seen.
Beside the Pool they have built a shrine; the authorities have established a ritual;
A dragon by itself remains a dragon, but men can make it a god. ”

“ Only the willows like dancers' arms, and the pond like a mirror.
When the flowers are falling at yellow twilight, when things are sad and hushed.
One does not hear songs and flutes, but only chimes and bells. ”

“ At the top it told the sorrows of an exile's heart;
At the bottom it described the pains of separation.
The sorrows and pains took up so much space
There was no room left to talk about the weather! ”

“ Of cloudy waves and misty billows down in the uttermost depths
Men have fabled, in the midst there stand three sacred hills.
On the hills, thick growing,— herbs that banish Death.
Wings grow on those who eat them and they turn into heavenly "hsien." ”

“ In the morning they must satisfy hunger and thirst with neither plate nor cup:
At night they must lie in their dirt and rags on beds that stank with filth.
Suddenly they came to the Yangtze River and remembered the waters of Chiao. [1]
With lowered hands and levelled voices they sobbed a muffled song.
Then one Tartar lifted up his voice and spoke to the other Tartars,
"Your sorrows are none at all compared with my sorrows." ”

“ Above it in the distance they see the walls of a house.
"There surely must be people living who'll give you something to eat."
They tap at the door, but no one comes: they look in, but the kitchen is empty. ”

“ No one could teach him to write the Chinese character for gold, till at last some one said: "Draw the roof of your house and then put a few strokes underneath" He thus learnt, in a rough fashion, to write his own name. ”

“ A Taoist wizard told him that herbs of longevity grew near the city of T'ai-chou. The Emperor at once appointed him prefect of the place, "pour lui permettre d'herboriser plus à son aise" [Wieger, Textes III, p. 1723] . When the censors protested, the Emperor replied: "The ruin of a single district would be a small price to pay, if it could procure longevity for the Lord of Men." ”

“ What is generally known as "blank verse" is the worst medium for translating Chinese poetry, because the essence of blank verse is that it varies the position of its pauses, whereas in Chinese the stop always comes at the end of the couplet. ”

“ You were staying for the night to the east of Shang-chou;
Sitting alone, lighted by a solitary candle
Lodging in the mountain hostel of Yang-Ch'ēng.
⁠Night was late when you finished writing,
The mountain moon was slanting towards the west
What is it lies aslant across the moon?
A single tree of purple paulovnia flowers,
Paulovnia flowers just on the point of falling
Are a symbol to express "thinking of an absent friend."
Lovingly — you wrote on the back side.
To send in the letter, your "Poem of the Paulovnia Flower." ”

“ The tallest of them never grow to more than three feet.
They were sold in the market as dwarf slaves and yearly sent to Court;
Described as "an offering of natural products from the land of Tao-chou."
A strange "offering of natural products"; I never heard of one yet
That parted men from those they loved, never to meet again!
Old men — weeping for their grandsons; mothers for their children! ”

“ He hopes for the coming of cold weather, to send up the price of coal!
Last night, outside the city,— a whole foot of Snow;
At dawn he drives the charcoal wagon along the frozen ruts.
Oxen,— weary; man,— hungry: the sun, already high ”

“ Chinese text with Latin translation. Vol. V deals with poetry. None of the poems is earlier than T'ang. The Latin is seldom intelligible without reference to the Chinese. Translators have obviously used Zottoli as a text. Out of eighteen Sung poems in Giles's book, sixteen will be found in Zottoli. ”

“ Escaping their vigilance for a moment, he leapt into a river and was drowned.
The following song describes the flight of a husband and wife from a town menaced by the advancing Manchus. They find the whole country-side deserted. ”

“ For example, part of a poem by Po Chü-i about Yang T'ai-chēn is here given as a complete poem and ascribed to "Yan-Ta-Tchen" as author. The poet Han Yü figures as Heu-Yu; T'ao Han as Sao Nan, etc. Such mistakes are evidently due to faulty decipherment of someone else's writing. Nevertheless, the book is far more readable than that of St. ”