is for us less familiar and less adored. It was once the fashion to exalt China: the Chinese, it was claimed, had invented everything. But reaction led to mockery. And now we talk of Mandarinism, of immobility, of petrifaction. But even supposing that a civilization that has lasted for some dozens of centuries has come to a stop (and who can say that it has stopped indeed?), it remains true that before it stopped it had progressed for a long, long time. And of this living past there remain thousands of works in millions of volumes. What do we know of these works? We know the King, translated but seldom read and little understood; the Tâo Teh King, often translated and none the less obscure; a few romances; a few brief poems. The Sinologues do not like to translate. What is more, they make their own selections. And on what basis do they choose? They know the Chinese characters and bibliographies and historical systems, but how much taste have they for poetry? Consider, for instance, the translations of poems of the Tang dynasty by Hervey de Saint Denis. Alas! The good man confesses that he has selected for translation those poems which seem to him most significant as historical documents. What a treatment for poetry! The Tang poems are like the dust on a butterfly’s wing, and those which have most lyric beauty are still untranslated.
