Peasants have confused us. We have in our discussions of them, imposed a structure on their lives, defined their behavior and denied their consciousness. We believe their actions to be predictable, but their irruptions and the extent of their violence inexplicable. Bound by tradition, tied to their village, loyal to their lords, they seem to us simultaneously irreverent, rude, ribald and lacking in respect. We find them shrewd in their economic judgments, but incapable of knowing their own real interests. Though they appear responsive to social and economic change, they also seem bound by symbols and ideologies that tie them to the past. They are never at home no matter where they move. Committed to their own interests, they are nevertheless tricked and cheated by city slickers, seigneurs and nobles.

One critic of Chinese poetry has written, suggestively: “Western readers are sometimes struck by what they do not find …”. One of the most familiar constituents of poetry, particularly of the lyric, that will not be found in much of Chinese nature poetry is an identifiable grammatical subject. It is not uncommon for a translator of Chinese poetry to ask “… who is its subject? I? You? She?” The requirements of the translation into Western languages suggest, of course, that a subject be supplied. Caught between syntactical correctness and the authority of the text, the translator is often forced to opt for fluency in the target language rather than fidelity to the source language. To be sure, this practice is of no great consequence in most instances. But, if we look at two excerpts, one from the Li Sao and the other from the T'ang shih san pai shou, and compare both text and translation, it becomes clear that there will be times when something other than mere linguistic convention is involved.

Though Taiwan has since 1949 been the seat of the Nationalist Government and the domicile of several millions of exiled Chinese, no serious literature has been produced until the late fifties.1 Explanations are not difficult to give. For one thing, since nearly all the important figures of modern Chinese literature have remained in the People's Republic of China,” their works are therefore proscribed for political reasons. Cut off from their mainland base, the disinherited young Taiwanese writers, having no native idols to emulate and anxious to create a tradition of their own, could only import from the West whatever “isms” they considered to be the literary fashions of the day—symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, futurism, modernism, phenomenalism, etc. Quite often, however, what they regarded as daring experiments at the time of initiation later turned out to be

The British impact on India perhaps was as profound on issues of the death rate and population growth as on political and economic development, but it has been less thoroughly examined.1 And in contrast to successes by the mid-twentieth century in limiting small-pox, malaria, and cholera, there was an earlier and darker tale, almost as obscure as the lives of the millions who perished in terrible epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was how new economic conditions, ineffective village sanitary practices, the impact of modern transport and irrigation works, and population pressure and poverty all helped the spread of disease, and how public health measures failed to prevent a high mortality.

It is no easy undertaking to make significant and, at the same time, unprejudicial comments on a book of the sort under review when the author is a person of total religious commitment and the reviewer a glaubensloser Philolog. It is doubly difficult to do justice to the book while saying something meaningful to a body of readers most of whom view the issue with the eye of the social scientist, which is that neither of the author nor of the reviewer.

The Earliest Vinaya and the Beginnings of Buddhist Literature. By Erich Frauwallner. Volume VIII of Serie Orientate Roma. Edited by Giuseppe Tucci. Rome: Institute per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1956.

This is a most important volume of seventeen essays,* each written by an important scholar in the field. Largely bibliographical in nature, the essays cover American-East Asian relations from the earliest meetings through the 1960s. The approach is largely chronological, but important topical essays include Robert S. Schwantes’ “America and Japan,” (although this is limited chronologically), and Peter W. Stanley's “The Forgotten Philippines, 1790–1946.”