Wild Geese Returning

Name: Wild Geese Returning
Price: 19.9500 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 978-962-996-800-7

Chinese Reversible Poems

Michèle Métail • Translated by Jody Gladding

English , 2016/11 Calligrams Series The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

Tags: Poetry, Literature, Calligrams Series

216 x 140 x 16 mm , 312pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-962-996-800-7

US$19.95

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The genre of poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing different creations was known as the “flight of wild geese.” These poems were often sent so that a distant lover, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the 4th Century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband using a grid of 840 characters that created perhaps 12,000 ways to read this poem. With examples from the 3rd to the 19th centuries, Michele Metail describes reversible poems as “a singular adventure at the edge of meaning, of language, and of writing.”

Map of the Armillary Sphere by Su Hui Download

Michele Metail, is an avant-garde poet and sinologist from France and the first woman member of Oulipo. This is her first book in English translation.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. She has received the French-American Foundation Translation Award and the Yale Younger Poets Prize.