the Chinese. Massarani’s Book of Jade is translated from the French of Judith Gautier; Mario Chini has given us an Italian rendering of the Si-siang-ki of Wang-chi-fu, but it is based on the French of Julien, and is merely a verse translation of the poetic portions of the work. The most active Italian translator, who is at the same time the dean of European Sinologues and one of the most truly learned of them all, is Carlo Puini. To him and to Giovanni Vacca, his scholar and my friend, I owe my knowledge of Kwang-tze, one of the noblest of Chinese philosophers, and at the same time an excellent writer.[1]
III
Kwang-tze was a Tâoist, and lived in the fourth century before Christ. Very little is known about his life. The Chinese are not greedy for biographies. They say: “He flourished under such and such a dynasty”—and they ask nothing further.
- ↑ Translations of passages from Kwang-tze are to be found in several of the works of Puini, and chiefly in his recent Taoismo (Lanciano, 1917). Translations by Vacca appear in the Leonardo (Florence, 1906). Selections appear in Buber’s Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse (Leipzig, 1910). There are complete English translations by Giles and by James Legge. Legge’s translation appears in The Texts of Tâoism (Oxford, 1891), Volumes XXXIX and XL of The Sacred Books of the East. In the present translation Papini’s quotations from an Italian version of Kwang-tze are replaced by the corresponding passages of Legge’s translation.
