SOURCE: A review of Oriental Tales, in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 302-07.

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...