For Christina, Chinese poetry and palindromes woven into silk

David Hinton discusses his book Classical Chinese Poetry, three minutes of evocative ancient Chinese poetry read beautifully by Hinton. These poems are so descriptive of the landscape both external and internal. They are very old but they could have been written today. Listen to a short taster below.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmWAspI5i2M&feature=player_embedded

A visual poem (Lady) Su Hui. This is a palindrome,  woven (or stitched on silk) in five colours.

"Chinese can be read in any direction. . . This fact gave rise to a genre in Chinese poetry of “reversible poems” (hui-wen shih), poems that can be read forward (from top right reading down) or in reverse. Su Hui’s text is the grandest example of this genre". David Hinton.

  

Su Hui’s Star Gauge

T’ao Ch’ien (365-427 C.E.) and Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 C.E.) are the first major poets in the mainstream Chinese poetic tradition. Remarkably, given the misogynistic structures governing the culture, they preceded by Su Hui, a female poet whose work is so singular that it stands almost outside the tradition. Su is the earliest major female figure that survives in the written tradition. She is said to have created thousands of literary compositions, but as was typical for women poets in ancient China, they were virtually all lost. Only her Star Gauge (Hsüan-chi Tu: literally “armillary-sphere map”) survived. Star Gauge was never included in the canon of great Chinese poetry, no doubt because its creator and its concerns were female, and its form so bizarre.