News Snapshot:
To our shame, few of us outside China know much about the country’s classical poetry. It doesn’t help that the way the names of leading poets are transliterated has changed so often. Many writers included in Ezra Pound’s groundbreaking collection Cathay, published in 1915, are unrecognisable by name today. Only a generation or so ago we called one of China’s greatest poets Li Po; nowadays we know him as Li Bai. And Li Bai’s friend and contemporary, the magnificent Du Fu, was until recently called Tu Fu in the west; different enough to put people who don’t speak Chinese off...