Tang Xiansu was a contemporary of Shakespeare (and Cervantes!). His masterpiece, _The Peony Pavilion_, a musical drama in the Kunqu style, is Shakespearean in its literary quality--as translated by Cyril Birch--and super-Shakespearean in its length and scope. Its 55 scenes, playing 20 hours, include all of Shakespeare's genres: romance, history, comedy, tragedy, lyric poetry. A magnificent work and vital theatre as done complete in New York in 1999. Birch's brief intro helps you get into the piece; his short book, "Scenes for Mandarins: The Elite Theater of the Ming" (Columbia University Press), tells more and also introduces other playwrights and plays in his elegant translations.

I love this book. It's so romantic and it has a lot of suspense in it.

ANTHOLOGY OF CHINESE LITERATURE : From early times to the fourteenth century. Compiled and edited by Cyril Birch. Associate editor Donald Keene. 492 pp. New York : Grove Press, 1965.

Birch's anthology has always been one of my favorite books. In contrast to the more recent mammoth compilations of Victor Mair (1335 pages) and John Minford (1176 pages), the Birch, at a mere 492 pages, is a far more modest and manageable proposition.

Unlike the Mair and Minford, it can be held easily in the hand while reading, and it is printed in a large clear font on spacious pages in which the lines have room to breathe. Modest in size it is also modest in presentation. Selections are preceded by only the briefest of introductions, and footnotes have been kept to a minimum.

The Birch is also unlike the former two anthologies in that it has restricted itself to contributions from just twenty-one translators, most of them well-known names such as A. C. Graham, Donald Keene, Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, Gary Snyder, and Burton Watson. In other words, its complement of translators is not swelled by a substantial contingent of second-tier, relatively unknown, and sincere though not particularly inspired academic translators.

One happy consequence of this is that the Birch, although in terms of quantity it holds perhaps only a third as much material or less than the Mair or Minford, has a higher relative proportion of quality translations. In other words, most of its selections actually read, not so much as 'translations' but as good literature - the tone, feelings, imagery, rhythms, and control of sound are what we expect to find in original works. Anything less than such excellence is, of course, hardly worth bothering with, and there is a lot of such excellence in the Birch.

As for Birch's selections, he seems to have struck a nice balance between prose and poetry of different kinds. We are given, for example, thirty-three poems from the 'Book of Songs,' some rendered by Waley and others by Pound. We also find such things as 'The Songs of Ch'u;' the Taoist Chuang Tzu; Burton Watson's 'Grand Historian' SSu-ma Ch'ien; Rhyme Prose; Letters; Satires; the Poetry of the Recluse; the great T'ang poets Wang Wei, Li Po, and Tu Fu; Prose Essays; T'ang Short Stories; other great poets such as Li Ho and Li Shang-yin, as well as many other fine but lesser known writers.

The book also includes a substantial selection from the Sung Dynasty, and is rounded out with two Yuan Dynasty plays, an extract from the Yuan novel, 'The Men of the Marshes,' and a modest but useful Bibliography which offers a number of suggestions for further reading.

There is an enormous amount of pleasure to be had from this book, and instruction too. For in reading it we learn a great deal about the sensibility of a people who have been described by Pierre Ryckmans, not without some justice, as "the most intelligent people in the world" ('Chinese Shadows,' Viking, 1977). One of my great favorites in the Birch anthology has always been the brilliant 'Essay on Literature' ('Wen fu') by Lu Chi (+ 754-805). Here is a line from Shih-hsiang Chen's admirable translation (p.208) :

"The argument (shuo) with glowing words and cunning parables persuades."

What Lu Chi seems to be saying is that "theses are convincing, but deceptive." As such the line becomes a caution against trusting too much in theses and 'rational' argument, a caution against lending ourselves too readily to what Lin Yutang has called an excessive, as opposed to a more reasonable, use of reason. Lu Chi's are words that a Cartesian and ever more Frenchified West, with its slick and deodorized armies of specialists, analysts, and technicians, would do well to take to heart if the relentless Juggernaut of Reason now underway isn't to end up crushing everything beneath its wheels.

For anyone who would like to get a good idea of what Chinese Literature is all about, and to actually enjoy the experience of finding out, there could be no better book than Cyril Birch's anthology. The Mair and Minford are all very well in their way and serve as useful references, but they are hardly books that one can sit down and read with pleasure from beginning to end.

The Birch, however, is just such a book, and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who would like to begin exploring one of the richest and most interesting literatures in the world.

Here, for those who may want to know, are details of the Mair and Minford anthologies :

THE COLUMBIA ANTHOLOGY OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE LITERATURE. Edited by Victor H. Mair. 1335 pp. New York : Columbia University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-231-07428-X (hbk.)

CLASSICAL CHINESE LITERATURE : An Anthology of Translations, Volume I : From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. Edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau. 1176 pp. New York and Hong Kong : Columbia University Press and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. ISBN 0-231-09676-3 (hbk.)

Cyril Birch is the author of the superb translation of Tang Xianzu's magnificent "The Peony Pavilion," contemporary with Shakespeare's plays and worthy of comparison with them, on the page thanks to Mr. Birch and on the stage thanks to the Lincoln Center Festival 1999. His introduction to Ming musical drama not only gives much background on "Pavilion" and its author, setting them in their historical and literary context, but whets the appetite to read and see the dramas he discusses by 5 other authors. Birch is not only a deeply knowledgeable scholar but an elegant and lively writer.