Chinese Poems
Printed by Lowe Bros. 1916. First edition. Original printed self-wrappers, stitched within a slate-grey paper wrapper (made from a Colnaghi catalogue cover), on which Waley has written in red the three Chinese characters "Ku Shih Chi". With some pencilled corrections of misprints in the author's hand. A fine copy, signed much later by Waley on the title page. Waley's rare first book, privately printed in an edition of about fifty copies, the existence of which was unknown to bibliography until 1962. There are, as far as we can tell, eleven extant copies, of which we can brag of having owned six. Johns A1.Waley's authentic and musical translations infused the stress-rhythms of Chinese poetic forms into English. His influence on later English poetry and scholarship was immense. But one must read this collection also as a product of its time and place,and the immediacy of the war and its effects. Rupert Brooke (who had died the previous year) had been a close friend of Waley's at Rugby and King's College, Cambridge, and Waley's brother David (who had been a classmate of Julian Grenfell, killed in 1915) enlisted in August 1916. Although damage to an eye made Waley unable to serve in the military, and his close, private nature, expressed little in the way of personal sentiment, the selection and order of texts give an insight into his thought. No fewer than a dozen of the poems included in "Chinese" Poems refer directly to war, from the first, Ch'ü Yüan's "Battle" (included in "The Oxford Book of War Poetry", ed. Stallworthy, 1984), to the last, Wang Chi's "On Coming to a Tavern" where Waley annotates the phrase "like drunkards," as "indulging in their idiotic war" (the very last words in the book). Item #29166
At the British Museum, where Waley began working in June 1913, shortly after its formation, he had the job of creating the first index of Chinese and Japanese painters; he immediately began to teach himself Chinese and Japanese, and within three years produced this volume of 52 translations, ten of which he included in his first published book, "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems", published in 1918. "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems" was cited by Cyril Connolly as one of the "100 Key Books in the Modern Movement". Pearsall Smith's name appears in Waley's list of 61 people who were candidates to receive copy of this volume, along with other writers: Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell. With the penciled signature of Robert Gathorne-Hardy who succeeded Cyril Connolly as Pearsall Smith's secretary/companion, and inherited his library.
Jonathan Spence wrote of Waley's translations that he
selected the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature and pinned them quietly to his chest. No one ever did anything like it before, and no one will ever do it again. There are many westerners whose knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese. Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.[8]
His many translations include A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), Japanese Poetry: The Uta (1919), The No Plays of Japan (1921), The Tale of Genji (published in 6 volumes from 1921 to 1933), The Pillow Book of Sei Sh nagon (1928), The Kutune Shirka (1951), Monkey (1942, an abridged version of Journey to the West), The Poetry and Career of Li Po (1959) and The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces (1964). Waley received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his translation of Monkey, and his translations of the classics, the Analects of Confucius and The Way and Its Power (Tao Te Ching), are still in print, as is his interpretive presentation of classical Chinese philosophy, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939).
Waley's translations of verse are widely regarded as poems in their own right, and have been included in many anthologies such as the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse and the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1918–1960) under Waley's name. Many of his original translations and commentaries have been re-published as Penguin Classics and Wordsworth Classics, reaching a wide readership.
Despite translating many Chinese and Japanese classical texts into English, Waley never travelled to either country, or anywhere else in East Asia. In his preface to The Secret History of the Mongols he writes that he was not a master of many languages, but claims to have known Chinese and Japanese fairly well, a good deal of Ainu and Mongolian, and some Hebrew and Syriac.
The composer Benjamin Britten set six translations from Waley's Chinese Poems (1946) for high voice and guitar in his song cycle Songs from the Chinese (1957) [Wikipedia].
Price: $20,000.00