Project: An illustrated book of 24 poems

Date: Published 2007

With: The Old Stile Press, Llandogo, Wales; The Fine Bindery, Wellingborough, England

Nicholas McDowall of The Old Stile Press writes:

This collaboration between Japanese printmaking techniques and European letterpress has been a fascinating experience for us and the result, we believe, is an extremely interesting and beautiful book.

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The selection of the twenty-four poems is from '170 Poems' and from 'Chinese Poems', two books which the Orientalist, Arthur Waley, translated in the first half of the twentieth century. For this book, poems were chosen that were both beautiful to read and which also inspired Ralph Kiggell to produce images as woodblock prints . . . animals, plants, landscapes, moods and atmospheres.

Given the extraordinary immediacy and relevance to today’s world of many of the poems, it is easy to forget that they were written between a thousand and three thousand years ago, in another country and in a different language.

The evening river is level and motionless -
The spring colours just open to their full.
Suddenly a wave carries the moon away
And the tidal water comes with its freight of stars.

Waley’s translated Chinese poems were perfect. They had created a stir when the first collection was published in 1918. While Waley did not try to translate the rhythms and rhymes of the original poems, the strange metres and ‘sprung rhythms’ he devised and the apparent simplicity and accessibility of the poems became influential in modern English poetry. Arthur Waley learned Chinese and Japanese, he said, to read inscriptions on the Chinese paintings and Japanese prints he worked with when he was a curatorial assistant in the Oriental Department of the British Museum’s Print Room. He studied at the newly opened School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

As a teenager, Ralph Kiggell had read and loved Waley’s translation of the classic tale Monkey and this had helped inspire him to study Chinese . . . at the same school, now much nearer the British Museum, some sixty years later! As a student, he often saw exhibitions of Ukiyo-e prints at the Museum and, several years later, he went to Tokyo to study Japanese woodblock printing. He now lives and works in Bangkok as a woodblock artist . . . although, happily, he does return to Britain often enough to make it possible for this enterprise to be carefully planned and for the scores of woodblocks finally to be personally delivered to the Press!

30 x 285mm. 56pp. Elizabeth type. The paper is 250gsm Vélin Arches. RalphKiggell’s blocks throughout the book were printed from the wood. The book was case-bound at The Fine Bindery with papers printed with the artist’s images and the slipcase is cloth-covered and has a printed label. The main edition consists of 150 copies, numbered and signed by the artist.