LES POÈMES DE T'AO TS'IEN

Paris: Éditions Lemarget, 1930. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine. 34 cm. 79,[6] pp. including 3 etchings by Sanyu, plus frontispiece portrait of the poet after Hwang Shen. Modern ochre red silk over boards, brass plate stamped through with title in Chinese on front board, original wrappers bound in. In red cardboard portfolio with red ribbon tie. Portfolio moderately worn, torn at corners. Brass plate faintly scratched and lightly oxidized, else fine, in a very good portfolio.

Numbered 56 of 290 copies on vélin d'Arches (of a total edition of 306), specially bound in silk with a brass title cover plate.

T'ao Ts'ien (365-427) (best (truncated) known in English today as Tao Qian or by his birth name, Tao Yuanming), was a major Chinese poet of the Six Dynasties period, regarded as a founder and leading representative of the Fields and Gardens movement. Tao's translator is Liang Zongdai (1903-1983), a Guangxhi-born poet who had arrived in Europe in 1924 to study Western languages. He dedicates the work to his friend Jean Prévost, recalling that he had kept some of the poems hidden in a drawer for fear that they would contribute to the mass of poor translations of Chinese masterpieces: "I read them to you, however, one evening in the glow of a nightlight on the banks of the Seine. And, to my great surprise, they found prompt approval in you. From then on, your encouragement allowed me calmly to pursue my work, the fruit of which was this little volume." Liang returned to China in 1931 and would translate works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake, Rilke, Paul Valéry, and other European poets and thinkers into Chinese.

The poems are illustrated with three original etchings by the celebrated Chinese-French painter and printmaker Sanyu (or Chuang Yu, 1901-1966), often hailed as "the Chinese Matisse." Sanyu, who, like Liang, moved to Paris in the early 1920s as part of the first major generation of Chinese artists to study in Europe, remained in the West after his youth, settling in Montparnasse. His period as a printmaker was relatively brief, particularly his work in etching and drypoint, which for practical reasons he abandoned for linocut in 1932 (several years before Matisse began working in the same medium). The Chinese landscapes in the present etchings are an important departure from Sanyu's usual subjects of nudes and still lifes, helping complete the picture of his marriage and transmutation of traditional Chinese and Modernist mediums and techniques. (Inventory #: 924)