PREFACE

This little jeu d'esprit is well known, but, as with many of our own nursery classics, its authorship is unacknowledged. I bought my copy at a book-stall in Ichang for 1/12d. Whether it dates from the Sung dynasty (twelfth century), as one wise native informed me it did, or later, I am unable to say. Suffice it that, apart from its unquestioned humour, the poem gives us incidentally some interesting and effective pictures of Chinese social life, and so has, I venture to think, a more than ephemeral interest and needs no apology from me for its introduction to Western readers.

The “Plaint laid by the Rat against the Cat” is told in the common two-lined stanza of seven syllables to the line. It comprises 222 of these lines and is written in what may be called the colloquial style of Chinese versification. All the words being monosyllables, each syllable is a word and so each line contains seven words, and, we may say, seven feet. It has been my endeavour to make the translation as literal as possible and to avoid paraphrase. I have allowed myself seven dissyllables in each English line as an equivalent for the seven monosyllables of the original, and have thus a two-lined stanza, equally of seven feet, by which to render the Chinese stanza, which rhymes in tone but not in sound:—in both the cœsura comes after the fourth foot.