Page:The works of Li Po - Obata.djvu/13

 him my book in all humility although I have profited by the contributions of my predecessors, and although I feel that in the limited scope I have chosen, my work is generally adequate.

I am a Japanese. I pretend to no erudition in Chinese literature. But I have been all my life a student and lover of Chinese poetry, or as much of it as I can read. In my boyhood I learned some shorter pieces of Li Po by heart. And during these past years of my study and travel in America I have always carried with me a small edition of his works. These translations were made at intervals, over half of them having been finished before the spring of 1916. It is more than a year since the entire collection was completed and I began to look for a publisher. A few of the poems were published in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, a student publication at the University of Wisconsin where I did my graduate work in English during 1917-1918. One poem (No. 9) was printed by a friendly editor in 1919 in the now defunct Art and Life. All the rest is presented to the public for the first time.

For the historical and biographical matter in the Introduction I drew only on the most reliable Chinese sources such as the writings of the poet himself and his contemporaries and the two Books of Tang, while I referred constantly to the works of European historians and translators. As to the poems themselves, they represent only a little more than one-tenth of the works of Li Po preserved in the standard Chinese edition, but I have tried to make the selection as varied and representative as possible and included, consequently, a number of popular pieces which have been translated by more than one hand. I have honestly tried my best to follow the original poems closely and to preserve