So it goes. China has a marvelous and limitless literature—drama, philosophy, history, romance. No genre is missing. One may draw in one’s nets heavy-laden, as in a lake where no one has fished before. Who in Europe is really familiar with the poets Li-po, Tu-fu, Wen-kiun, Wang-wei, Po-kin-i, Su-kung-tu? Or the dramatists Wang-chi-fu, Ma-h-yuen, Pe-gen-fu? Or the philosophers Lieh-tze, Yang-min, Kwang-tze, Yang-chu?[1] These are the first names that occur to me out of many that I have seen or heard. They are but a handful drawn from a full granary. And no one of these men is inferior in art or in profundity to the most famous writers of Europe. Yet in Europe there are scarcely fifty people who could read them in the original, and five thousand at the most who may have read some fragments or pronounced their names.
In Italy it is worse yet. The very first Sinologues were Italians—Ricci and Desideri—and there have been others since. But they have either translated little or have translated in verse. Andreozzi has rendered The Tooth of Buddha of Shenai-ghan (the one Chinese romance that has come to be fairly well known, thanks to a popular edition); Severini has translated several poems, but more from the Japanese than from
- ↑ The translator assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the Chinese names cited incidentally in this essay.
