[In the following review, Czynski lauds Yourcenar's writing style and discusses Oriental Tales in relation to the development of the short story genre. Czynski also comments on some of the inadequacies he sees in Alberto Manguel's translation of the collection.]

To journey is to appropriate the world; distances hitherto descried as limitless barriers are resolved into horizons of the mind, unified therein. The journeyer may voyage in space and time: Marco Polo's Description of the World (c. 1300), Kipling's From Sea to Sea (1899), Kazantzakis' Voyage to Japan and China (1938). The journeyer may set forth within the realm of the literary imagination: James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Endō Shūsaku's Samurai (1980; English trans., 1982). Marguerite Yourcenar's collection of ten Oriental Tales (Nouvelles orientales, 1938) is a transposition at once of both modes of journeying, exemplifying as well a unique meeting of East and West.

During the 1920s and '30s, when Marguerite Yourcenar voyaged to Greece visiting the countries bordering the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean, her ever-exploring mind transposed what she saw and heard into the domain of prose fiction. She pursued thus her eastward journey along the paths of folk-tale, legend, and literature, her gaze seeking out the distant horizons of India, China, and Japan. Hence, the adjective "Oriental" in the title is justified, all the more so since in French "the Orient" encompasses eastern Europe (Polish is considered a langue orientale, an "eastern tongue"), Russia, the Near East, and all the countries and seas extending as far as the Land of the Rising Sun.

Marguerite Yourcenar, a resident of Mount Desert Island, Maine, is known to English-speaking readers as the authoress of Memoirs of Hadrian, splendidly translated almost three decades ago by Grace Frick in collaboration with Ms. Yourcenar, and as the first woman writer to be elected to the Académie Française (1980). She herself has translated into French "Negro Spirituals," with commentaries, under the title Deep torrent, Dark river (1964). Her long-standing interest in Japan is especially manifest in a 125-page essay (recently translated into English) on the novelist Mishima Yukio entitled Mishima, or the Vision of Emptiness (1980).

The reproduction of a detail from a painting by Tao-chi (China, 1641–1710)—Returning Home (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)—as the central image of the dustjacket design, executed by Cynthia Krupat, is to be commended as an appropriate choice. The publisher's blurb thereon is, however, a simplification that misrepresents the nature of this recital of tales. Specifically, it is an error to state that Marguerite Yourcenar's stories "follow no established tradition."

First of all, the volume had its precedent, as Ms. Yourcenar avows in Les Yeux ouverts, in Gobineau's six Nouvelles asiatiques, published in 1876. As in the case of Gobineau's nouvelles, the majority of Ms. Yourcenar's short stories originally appeared in periodicals, hers during the years 1928–1937. Whereas Gobineau's romantic and exotic Tales of Asia are longer than the Nouvelles orientales, both collections do illustrate the genre termed nouvelle. In essence, this designates a short piece of narrative prose, occasionally enclosed within a prologue and an epilogue, the primary focus of which is a brief sequence of events undertaken, or undergone, by the principal figure or figures, rather than, as in the novel, character-development in a psychological or Bildungsroman sense. Indeed, the central character is more or less static, sketched monochromatically, and in some measure allegorical, while the events, situations, or episodes of conflict to which the narrative framework is restricted culminate in a comic, or tragic, climax that surprises even as it is seen to be the inevitable outcome of the circumstances. The inexorable unfolding of the plot-logic of Somerset Maugham's short stories is exemplary in this regard; John Barth's volume of novellas Chimera (1973) is a contemporary illustration of the genre's survival.

Secondly, Marguerite Yourcenar did indeed deliberately compose within the traditions of the nouvelle (short story) and the conte (tale), for both terms appear in her Postscript as applicable to one or another of the ten stories. The first edition of this work appeared in 1938 in the Gallimard series "La Renaissance de la Nouvelle," such designation likewise underscoring the literary lineage. Since then, the collection, augmented with a tenth story in 1978, underwent two stylistic revisions, published in 1963 and 1979. Both editions contain slightly different Postscripts offering authorial insights into the origins and themes of these culturally diverse prose-fantasias and retellings of folk and classical literature and myth. The ten stories are individually so multifariously rich and so gracefully wrought, novels-in-miniature one is tempted to say, that the delights of rereading—surprise renewed, wisdom gleaned, reflections provoked—are most devoutly, and long-lastingly, to be savoured.

"How Wang-Fo was saved" (or "spared"; the hyphen is unnecessary between the surname and the given-name), the opening piece in the recital, is a retelling of a Taoist morality-tale concerning an aged painter, Master Wang "the Buddha-aspirant" ("Fo" signifies "the Buddha"). It illustrates a certain magical dimension intrinsic to the metaphysical continuum bridging a work of art and imitated reality. It may well have been inspired by a passage in Arthur Waley's book on Chinese painting Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (1923) wherein Waley alludes to the T'ang dynasty painter Wu Tao-tzu (fl. early eighth century): "The Taoists have annexed [Wu] as one of their divinities and tell us that he disappeared into one of his own pictures." In like manner, master of the brush Wang Fo comes to be spared the evil designs of imperial wrath through both his art and the (post-mortem!) devotion of his faithful disciple Ling. The realm of the fantastic is thus one with the domain of the real.

The second piece introduces the reader to a Serbian folk-hero, Marko Kraljević, whose patriotic and death-defying exploits in the face of Turkish brutality reveal a singular and admirable weakness, itself a moral strength leading to more than military victory. A conquest of a different order ensues: omnia vincit amor, as Vergil has said. The ninth piece, composed in 1978, tells of Marko's fateful encounter with a formidable Old Man, he who has always vanquished Life with the relentless grip of his invisible hands.

The third is based on a mediaeval Balkan folk-ballad, as naively touching as any work of hagiography evoking the miraculous powers of motherhood.

The fourth depicts the twilight hours of Genji the Shining Prince's long day's journey into night. This account of the death of the Shining Prince was inspired, as Ms. Yourcenar informs us in Les Yeux ouverts, by her reading of Arthur Waley's majestic translation in several volumes of the greatest Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. (It has been devotedly and masterfully translated anew by Edward Seidensticker.) The impending darkness of Genji's eternal rest is metaphorically anticipated by both his physical blindness and that of his heart, blind to the devotion of the noblewoman whose love was never truly acknowledged. In this prose-fantasia Marguerite Yourcenar has succeeded, as indeed she so intended, in portraying with poignantly drawn strokes of poetry Prince Genji's late years and last days in a manner worthy of Japan's preeminent novelist, who was, we should reiterate, an authoress. Herein Genji's death, passed over in silence by Murasaki Shikibu, incarnates a pathos surpassed only by the tragedy that darkened Ling's wedded life, told in the opening tale.

The fifth takes the reader to twentieth-century Greece where the Nereids, beauteous nymph-daughters of the sea in the pre-Homeric age, bestow upon an innocent youth the calamitous delights of courtship unsought, the euphoria of mythic misfortune. The sixth transports us to fourth-century Greece at the time of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, whose disciple Therapion encounters the compassionate Blessed Virgin while he is engaged in the zealous pursuit, indeed persecution, of a different species of nymph, denied by him their rightful place in the divine economy. In this fantasia the authoress suggests the origin of the name of a chapel found in the Athens countryside. The seventh piece returns us to Greece of the 1920s and '30s, calling to mind the village world of Zorba the Greek. It is the retelling of a folk-anecdote which unfolds, in dramatically poised, heart-laden steps, the grim tale of primitive passions incarnate in a peasant widow whose very name, Aphrodissia, betrays her nature, if not her fate.

The eighth, set in India, retells a Hindu myth concerning the Fierce Goddess, Kali, demonic consort of Śiva, she who symbolizes the inherent discords of human nature, its broken harmonies, the spirit ever in conflict with what Tennessee Williams called, in Night of the Iguana, "the earth's obscene, corrupting love."

The tenth and closing piece concerns a Dutch portrait painter, Cornelius Berg, an embittered contemporary of Rembrandt's who comes to wish that God had never created mankind. For man the city-dweller and Naturequeller has defiled Creation's primordial beauties. The tulips cultivated by Berg's old friend symbolize an artificial paradise, insofar as they cannot obliterate awareness of all manner of ugliness and squalor brought by men into the world, robbing it thus of its blessed, pristine harmony. The recital thus opens and closes with reflections on man's possible redemption attained through a self-effacing Art. Indeed, this little book embodies such an endeavor as it proclaims that very hope.

The present translation was carried out by Alberto Manguel, apparently in collaboration with Ms. Yourcenar. Unfortunately, the original texts, having had to wait almost half a century to receive their English garb, were not, in contrast to the collaborative fruit Memoirs of Hadrian, as well outfitted as they deserved to be. Far greater justice could have been rendered to the poetic virtues of the French. The choice of English rendering is often not equal to the literary level of the original; moreover, a few clauses have been unjustifiably omitted, as well as a word or phrase here and there. Furthermore, a spontaneous dimension of storytelling is lost when car ("for") is, in all but one or two occurrences, turned into the expository "because." In several instances the word chosen is inaccurate. Chevreuil is given once as "she-goat" (ludicrously incongruous in the context), and in the second occurrence as the plural "wild deer"; in both cases it signifies the miniature and delicate "roe-deer." In the language of the King James Version, Creation is characterized as God's "handiwork," not "His handicraft" as in the translation (the French is oeuvre). In the short story about Wang Fo, the Tu addressed to the Emperor should be rendered "Thou" and "Thee," thereby maintaining the distinction between the honorific second-person singular and the informal tu ("you") uttered to the humble painter, the latter tu conveying the nuance of "lowly subject."

In the tale of Prince Genji linguistic matters are more complicated. The name Murasaki, shared by the authoress and a quasi-autobiographical character, and correctly rendered in the French as Violette, was exotically transformed into "Wisteria." This is unjustified, despite the common attribute of color: fuji is the flower (forming only part of Murasaki Shikibu's clan name, Fujiwara, "Fields-of-Wisteria"), murasaki its purple and blue-lilac hues. "Lady-of-the-Convulvulus-Pavilion" is rather stilted. The flower in question is the morning glory (asago in Japanese: lit. "Face of the dawn"; volubilis in French). Hence, "Lady-of-the-Morning-glory-Pavilion" is preferable. Chujo, a court-rank used as an appellation, should have a macron over the "u" indicating a prolonged vowel: thus, Chūjo. "Lady-Cricket-in-the-Garden" should more evocatively be "Lady-of-the-Cicada-Arbour." This late-summer insect (semi in Japanese, cigale in French) is a perennial subject of Japanese poetry, as in the haikai verse of Bashō (1644–94) wherein the short-lived insect's chirping cry, innocent of imminent death in the unrestrained vigor of its voice, bespeaks an intimation of mortality, symbolizing thus the pathos known only to humankind. By way of conclusion, then, these are not stories told just for the telling. If we seek to discern a leitmotif in this sequence of old tales poured into new wine bottles, we shall find variations of Vergil's sunt lacrimae rerum. In "How Wang-Fo was saved" the Emperor, denouncing the old master's art as a deception, exclaims (in my translation): "The world is nought but a jumble of indistinct brushstrokes cast pell-mell by an artist void of reason, and ceaselessly washed away by the purifying flow of our tears." There are, as each story testifies, tears of joy and of sorrow for what befalls us: hearts will ever be moved by the vicissitudes to which we are prey, the ills and blessings of mortality to which we are, saints and sinners, heir. Marguerite Yourcenar is a journeyer who, having appropriated the world, has transcended space and time in her noble and masterly evocations of this, our so benighted heritage.