The Chinese Poetry Evening at the BL was more varied than I expected. There was music and a fifteen minute lecture with slides about calligraphy, delivered by the man who did the characters for the current Chinese poems on the London Underground. He was modest and self-deprecating in his manner, which endeared him to the audience.

Six poems, translated by Arthur Waley, were set to music 'for guitar and high voice' by Benjamin Britten, played by a very gifted female Chinese guitarist and sung by an English man with light curly hair and a satin waist-coat. He didn't have as high a voice as James Bowman, the counter-tenor I admire, but he sang very well, with a precise enunciation.

The poems were written between 1,000 - 600 B.C. One that made an impression me was 'The Big Chariot':

Don't help-on the big chariot;
You will only make yourself dusty.
Don't think about the sorrows of the world;
You will only make yourself wretched.

Don't help-on the big chariot;
You won't be able to see for dust.
Don't think about the sorrows of the world;
Or you will never escape from your despair.

Don't help-on the big chariot;
You will be stifled with dust.
Don't think about the sorrows of the world;
You will only load yourself with care.

A major theme of the Book of Songs, from which this was taken, was the burden of office for the educated men or literati who made up the civil service of the day and their wish to retire from the intrigues of court life. Here the big chariot seems to symbolise the machinery of bureacracy.