ABSTRACT
Up till now, few people have undertaken the difficult task of translating Thai poetry into English. No foreigner has as yet attempted to do for Thai literature what Arthur Waley has done for Chinese literature, Donald Keene for Japanese literature, or Burton Raffel for Indonesian poetry. However, a number of Thai intellectuals have selected their favourites to translate into English. The most popular collection of translations is probably Seni Pramoj’s Interpretative translations of Thai poets, (1965). The book includes examples of three main Thai poetic forms-the khlong, the and the rai-which the translator tried to maintain in his English translation. Selected poems by some classical poets were also translated by ThongIn Soonsawat in his small book The Thai poets (1968); Prince Prem Purachatra’s small booklet, Introduction to Thai literature (1967) contains some good translations of poems by two great poets, of the Ayutthayā period and Phū of the Bangkok period. Recently, the National Identity Board of Thailand published articles on Thai poetry and translations by Prince Chand under the title Facets of Thai poetry (Chand 1983). These authors, with the exception of Thong-In, have a near-native command of English and should, in practice, counter Professor Echols’ remarks that much of what had been translated into English by South East Asians was in unidiomatic English and, occasionally inelegant (Echols 1978).1
