Page:A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919).djvu/32

 This device, used with some discretion in T'ang, becomes an irritating trick in the hands of the Sung poets.

The Odes.—From the songs current in his day Confucius [551–479 B. C.] chose about three hundred which he regarded as suitable texts for his ethical and social teaching. Many of them are eulogies of good rulers or criticisms of bad ones. Out of the three hundred and five still extant only about thirty are likely to interest the modern reader. Of these half deal with war and half with love. Many translations exist, the best being those of Legge in English and of Couvreur in French. There is still room for an English translation displaying more sensitively to word-rhythm than that of Legge. It should not, I think, include more than fifty poems. But the Odes are essentially lyric poetry, and their beauty lies in effects which cannot be reproduced in English. For that reason I have excluded them from this book; nor shall I discuss them further here, for full information will be found in the works of Legge or Couvreur.

Elegies of the land of Ch'u.—We come next to Ch'ü Yüan [third century B. C.] whose famous poem "Li Sao," or "Falling into Trouble," has also been translated by Legge. It deals, under a love-allegory, with the relation between the writer and his king. In this poem, sex and politics are curiously interwoven, as we need not doubt they were in Chü Yüan's own mind. He affords a striking example of the way in which abnormal mentality imposes [ 26 ]