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Wild Geese Returning

Jody Gladding Michèle Métail

$39.99

Paperback

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English
New York Review Books
15 March 2017
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,

Mich le Metail 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.
By:   ,
Imprint:   New York Review Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Edition:   Main
Dimensions:   Height: 216mm,  Width: 142mm,  Spine: 17mm
Weight:   410g
ISBN:   9789629968007
ISBN 10:   9629968002
Pages:   190
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Mich le Metail, born in France in 1950, is a Sinologist, a photographer, and an avant-garde poet. She was the first female member of Oulipo and the co-founder of Dixit, a group dedicated to sound poetry. She is the author of two dozen books of poetry and translations from the Chinese, which she often performs accompanied by music and projected images. This is her first book in English translation. Jody Gladding has published three collections of poems-most recently, Translations from Bark Beetle-and more than thirty translations from the French. She has received the French-American Foundation Translation Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She lives in Calais, Vermont. Jeffrey Yang's most recent poetry collection is Vanishing-Line. His translation of Bei Dao's autobiography, City Gate, Open Up, will be published in Spring 2017. He works as an editor at New York Review Books and New Directions Publishing.

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