Arthur Waley

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
An account of the history and technique of Chinese poetry will be found in the introduction to my last book. [1] Learned reviewers must not suppose that I have failed to appreciate the poets whom I do not translate. Nor can they complain that the more famous of these poets are inaccessible to European readers ”