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James L Watson and Evelyn S Rawski (ed): Death ritual in late imperial and modern China . xv, 334 pp. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988. $40.

his life as reflected in the work. Yates reminds us that the literary conventions of the two types of poetry are quite distinct, not simply in formal terms, but in imagery and content. It is, therefore, a distortion to see Wei's life and work predominantly in the light of the risque, romantic disengagement typical of the tz'u, called for as much by the form itself as by the inclinations of a particular writer. In Wei's shih Yates finds much evidence of his deep concern with the complex social and political events of his time, of his longing for engagement (frequently thwarted by rebellion and repeated failure in the imperial examinations), of his late successes and subsequent partial fulfilment in these directions. Yates thus assimilates Wei to the more usual figure of the Chinese poet who embodies those now familiar cultural complementarities: engagement/escapism; society/nature; Confuciansim/Taoism; public/private; shih/tz'u. In doing so, Yates certainly presents Wei as a less romantic, and perhaps also less superficially attractive figure, but, at the same time, succeeds in revealing him as a more complete and rounded personality. The author reinforces this argument by contrasting Wei's particular lyric (tz'u) style with that of Wen T'ing-yun. He argues that even in his lyrics, Wei is clearer and more logical, less allusive and more directly expressive, more sensitive to narrative coherence, in general, more straightforward than the form typically demands or demonstrates in the work of Wen T'ing-yun. But his examples are few and selective. Wei is demonstrably capable of lyrics with rich imagery and deep opacity (Tl). Moreover, to qualify Yates's argument, one can point to shih poems translated here which are also rich, allusive, and opaque (SI7), and positively disengaged (S32). It in no sense vitiates the main thrust of his work, but it does sometimes seem that Yates adopts differing approaches when translating or selecting from the two types of poetry in Wei's output. With the tz'u he is more cautious. He translates in a way which provides a 'visual representation of the original line length' (a useful and easily achievable device), following the poem closely and often providing pronouns and demonstratives which suggest a more straightforward, less ambiguous reading. Since, in general, the content and form of the shih poems present less of a challenge to his view of the work, Yates is more at home with them and so takes more liberties. Without attempting the (almost impossible) task of retaining original formal features in his translation and without straying far from the ' semantic sense of the original', he adopts a wide variety of techniques in rendering the shih, and is unashamedly experimental. This distracts us from his interpretative argument, but it produces some fine writing in English and some interesting, wellcadenced versions. His translations of Wei's tz'u and more tame and less successful. The book has generally been well-edited, although a line from the following translation has been disconcertingly (another experiment?) repeated after the final line of T30 (p. 224). One regrets the lack of any parallel Chinese text, but it is pleasing to see a partial reproduction (on the endpapers) from one of the early tenth century manuscripts of the ' Lament of the Lady of Ch'in' in the Stein collection of the British Library.