The Word (Volume 24); Monthly Magazine Devoted to Philosophy, Science, Religion Eastern Thought, Occultism, Theosophy and the Brotherhood of Humanity

by Harold Waldwin Percival

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHINESE POETRY AND MUSIC By Henry Borel Translated from De Amsterdammer. Weekblad voor Nederland. Amsterdam, November 4, 1916. By H. W. Roeloffzen. THE performance of Mahler's Lied von der Erde, in recent years, called attention to Chinese poetry, which in the West until lately was unfamiliar to the public at large. This Lied von der Erde by Mahler, was as we know, inspired by songs of Chinese poets he had read in Hans Bethge's Die Chinesische Flote (Leipsig, Insel Verlag). The musical editor of De Telegraaf in an article on the performance of Mahler's Lied von der Erde, wrote that he could not believe these songs came from real Chinese sources. As his reasons for this he gives, that the originals are so far away, and that none of the poems make him think of the Chinese, as they appear to us, and as we find them, in our tea and coffee stores in our exhibitions. From any one who knows the Chinese only from tea stores (Chinese coffee stores do not exist, coffee is not a Chinese product, and is imported into China) we cannot well expect that he has much knowledge of Chinese civilization, but, it is regrettable that the general public, too, and even the artists and intellectuals, know as much as nothing about Chinese poetry. This is mostly the fault of sinologistswho published volumes about superstition and hocus-pocus, and never mentioned the real Chinese poetry, because they could not understand it. Hans Bethge, who is not a sinologist, and who did not know the Chinese language, has not translated his Germanic verses directly from the Chinese. He cast them in a form of poetry after he got them from translations of the French sinologist Marquis d'Hervey de St. Denis, from a work of Judith Gauthier, and from German and English prose translations. That ...

124 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2009