Chinese poetry has long been lost in translation. You only have to look at a line in an ancient Chinese poem and its inscrutability is plain to see: four or five characters across the page, each with several venerable meanings and without markers of tense, speaker, conjunctions or prepositions. Every translator becomes an adventurer, one who can only haul the poem onto the shores of difference.

The loss is greater when the sonic properties of the characters are taken into account – something Ezra Pound realised astonishingly late in life, after his youthful love affair with the characters as pictures. The rhyme and metre of the ancient poems, with their complex parallelisms of tone, place them closer to a music no European language can render. Even the best translators know what is often forgotten: the poem they have made must be as silent, on the Chinese scale of experience, as a dead albatross.