Page:The works of Li Po - Obata.djvu/10

 Chinese Literature came out respectively in 1898 and 1901. While his dexterous renderings of Li Po and other poets have since been generally accepted as standard English versions, they fail to create an appetite for more of their kind owing probably to the professor's glib and homely Victorian rhetoric which is not to the taste of the present day. Mr. Cranmer-Byng is elegant, but somewhat prolix. His two books, A Lute of Jade and A Feast of Lanterns, have many gorgeous lines, suffused, I fear, with a little too much of Mr. Cranmer-Byng's own impassioned poetry. These three men be- long to the old school of translators, who usually employ rhyme and stanzaic forms.

Then, in 1915, Mr. Ezra Pound entered the field with his Cathay, a slender volume of a dozen or more poems mostly of Li Po, "translated from the notes of the late Professor Fenollosa and the decipherings of Professors Mori and Ariga." In spite of its small size and its extravagant errors the book possesses abundant color, freshness and poignancy, and is in spirit and style the first product of what may be called the new school of free-verse translators, who are much in evidence nowadays. I confess that it was Mr. Pound's little book that exasperated me and at the same time awakened me to the realization of new possibilities so that I began seriously to do translations myself. Mr. Waley omits Li Po from his first book, but includes in his More Translations a few specimens from a group of poems that he published in the Asiatic Review, in which he avers that he does not regard Li Po so highly as others do. On the other hand, Miss Lowell devotes her recent delightful volume, Fir-Flower Tablets, largely to our poet, with a selection of eighty-five poems by him. Mr. Bynner's translation of what he calls Three Hundred