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...wandered local library. I had a vague notion of tracking down some background information on Ausonius, the old Roman poet who gave us Mosella--a very beautiful description of the river Moselle and the country through which it flows. It is a literary equivalent of Smetana's Die Moldau.
In the course of poking about in various books, I finally came across an account of Ausonius in Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars. She likened the poetry of Ausonius to that of certain ancient Chinese poets, notably Han Yu (768-824) and Po Chu-i (772-846). This sent me off on the trail of old Chinese poets.
Of Han Yu, I could find out very little. Waddell tells us that his poetry was so exquisite that his friends, upon receiving a fresh manuscript from him, would always wash their hands in rose water before opening it. Han Yu also composed and delivered a famous "oration to the crocodile", thereby driving a pestiferous saurian from the local river by sheer word-power. They could write and speak well in those days.
Po Chu-i is better known. Arthur Waley translated many of his poems about ninety years ago and this collection has been republished many times since under the title One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. One of the poems, "Alarm at First Entering the Yang'tze Gorges", is justly famous and often appears in anthologies. Even if you are not fond of poetry, Arthur Waley's book is worth locating because of its remarkable Introduction (for which you will need an edition published after 1962) where Waley tells us how he first came to get interested in things Oriental.
Now, in the course of searching out Waley's book, I inadvertently pulled out another book alongside it. It was called Stories of Old China. Flicking through it in a desultory sort of way, as one often does in these...
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