How I Strayed into Asian Poetry

Abstract

When I began to write poetry in 1948, I felt an affinity with the poetry of Spain, China, and India. I had studied Hebrew and knew Spanish and French. Then in 1949, near the end of Greece's civil war, I went to live and work a few years in Athens. There Greek joined the list, at first modern, then ancient. In 1952 I wasted a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London as a full-time student in Bengali. During that season I saw Sir Arthur Waley almost every day, standing about and talking to colleagues and students, dressed formally except for his bicycle clips, which he never removed from his striped trousers. His translations of the classical Chinese poets had first drawn me into the imagery and overheard poetry of China. Waley, who set his friend Ezra Pound on the path to Cathay, introduced Chinese and Japanese poetry to generations of English readers in his books. But I was timid and never dared speak to the wonderful man who had been the hermit of the British Museum's Oriental Sub-Department of Prints and Drawings and who was later remembered in the title of a book of tributes as "Madly Singing in the Mountains." I lost the chance of my life to enter Chinese poetry with the poet-scholar whose sensibility for China's poets and philosophers gave us a civilization. I chose wrong between India and China.