#000438
Translations from the Chinese
Arthur Waley; illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge
*Translations from the Chinese* gathers the classical Chinese poetry that made Arthur Waley one of the most beloved translators of the twentieth century—the roughly 170 poems of his early volumes, brought together here in a handsome illustrated edition. Waley's plain, unrhymed English, faithful to the image and unfussy in its music, did more than almost anything to open Chinese verse to Western readers, and these versions of Bai Juyi, Tao Qian, and others still read with startling freshness. This 1941 Knopf edition adds drawings and ten full-page color plates by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge—painter, illustrator, and adventurer—whose work gives the book its warmth as an object. Waley, famously, never traveled to China or Japan, working entirely from texts; the paradox only deepens the achievement. For anyone meeting classical Chinese poetry for the first time, this remains an ideal and lovely door.
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The author
Arthur Waley (1889–1966) was the great English orientalist-translator of his generation, a self-taught reader of Chinese and Japanese who never once visited East Asia yet rendered its literature—The Tale of Genji, the poems of Bai Juyi, the Analects—into English of remarkable clarity. His unrhymed, image-faithful style broke with Victorian ornament and shaped how the West still reads Chinese poetry. The illustrator, Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge (1889–1977), was an American painter, illustrator, and traveler.
The book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941, this illustrated edition collects the roughly 170 poems of Waley's pioneering early volumes of 1918–19. As he notes in his preface, he corrected a few errors but otherwise reprinted the poems as they first stood. Baldridge supplied text drawings and ten full-page color plates, and the volume appeared in pictorial cloth with a slipcase—a book made to be handled.
How it has aged
Later scholars translate with more apparatus and debate Waley's liberties, but his versions endure because they are simply good poems in English. Their quiet directness has aged far better than showier contemporaries.
For more context
Readers can move on to Waley's The Tale of Genji and to later anthologies of classical Chinese verse.
Sources - Internet Archive - Borg Antiquarian (first edition thus)
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Arthur Waley; illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1941
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado
Places