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Wild Geese Returning:Chinese Reversible Poems
[Paperback - 2017]
jody gladding
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Category: Literature
Sub-category: Poetry
Publisher: New York Review Books | ISBN: 9789629968007 | Pages: 312
Shipping Weight: .414 | Dimensions: 5.6 x .65 x 8.49 inches

Description

A breathtaking introduction to Chinese multidirectional poems, told through the story of Su Hui, the greatest writer of these poems who embroidered a silk with 840 characters--equaling as many as 12,000 multidirectional poems--for her distant husband.

For nearly two thousand years, the condensed language of classical Chinese has offered the possibility of writing poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing entirely different creations. The genre was known as the “flight of wild geese,” and the poems were often symbolically or literally sent to a distant lover, in the hope that he or she, like the migrating birds, would return.
Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the fourth century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband consisting of a grid of 840 characters. No one has ever fully explored all of its possibilities, but it is estimated that the poem—and the poems within the poem—may be read as many as twelve thousand ways. Su Hui herself said, “As it lingers aimlessly, twisting and turning, it takes on a pattern of its own. No one but my beloved can be sure of comprehending it.”

With examples ranging from the third to the nineteenth centuries, Michèle Métail brings the scholarship of a Sinologist and the playfulness of an avant-gardist to this unique collection of perhaps the most ancient of experimental poems.

About the Author

Jean Giono (1895-1970) was a novelist, essayist, and playwright, and one of the most prolific and respected French writers of the 20th Century. Born to a modest family in Provence, he was conscripted to the French Army in the First World War, and the horrors he experienced cemented his lifelong commitment to pacifism. His first major literary success came with Colline (1929) which won him the Prix Brentano. He continued to publish novels and political writings during the 1930s, and his strict pacifism led him to be briefly imprisoned for collaboration before and after the Nazi occupation of France. After the Second World War Giono continued to gain success as a novelist, and many of his books were adapted into films. He received the Prince Rainier of Monaco Prize for lifetime achievement in 1953, was elected to the Academie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Literary Council of Monaco in 1963. About the translator: Jody Gladding is a translator and poet. She has published four poetry collections, Translations from Bark Beetle, Rooms and Their Airs, and Stone Crop, which was the winner of the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Her translations from the French include Jean Giono's Serpent of Stars and Pierre Michon's The Eleven.

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