Su Hui (poet)

Su Hui, from the book Wan hsiao tang by Kuan-Shou , 18th century

Su Hui ( Chinese  蘇蕙  /  苏蕙 , Pinyin Sū Huì , 4th century ) was a Chinese poet of the Middle Sixteen Kingdoms Period (304 to 439) during the Six Dynasties Period. Her Zì ( adult name) is Yun Yan ( Chinese  若蘭  /  若兰 , Pinyin Ruò Lán ). Su is famous for her extremely complex palindrome poem Xuanji Tu , with which she not only innovatively advanced the genre of classical Chinese poetry, but also created the most complex example to date.

biography

Su Hui with its large palindrome, the Xuanji Tu

Hui was a poet in the Kingdom of Earlier Qin (351–394). She came from a literary family in what is now Fufeng County in Shaanxi Province . Hui was the third daughter of Su Daozhi. She married at the age of 16 (15 according to western understanding) and moved with her husband Dou Tao to what is now the Qinzhou district of Tianshui City in Gansu Province , of which he was the governor.

The Palindrome Poem: Xuanji Tu

Hui was known for an important and unusual poem. It has been described in contemporary sources as woven on brocade cloth, read in a circle, and composed of 112 or 840 characters. In the Tang Dynasty , the following story was told about the poem:

“Dou Tao of Qinzhou was driven into the desert, away from his wife, Lady Su. After separating from Su, Dou vowed that he would not marry anyone else. However, when he arrived in the desert region, he immediately married someone. Lady Su created a circular poem, wove it in a piece of brocade fabric and sent it to him. "

Another source names the poem Xuanji Tu (image of the spinning ball), claiming it was a palindrome poem only understandable to Dou (which would explain why none of the Tang sources reprinted it) and when he read , he is said to have left his desert wife and returned to Su Hui.

The text of the poem circulated steadily in medieval China and was never lost, but it became rarer during the Song Dynasty . The 112-character version was included in early sources. The earliest excerpts of the 840-character version come from a text by Li Fang from the 10th century. Several 13th-century copies have been incorrectly ascribed to famous Song Dynasty women. During the Ming Dynasty , the poem became quite famous, and scholars discovered 7,940 ways to read it. It was mentioned in the 19th century fantasy novel Flowers in the Mirror .

The poem has the shape of a 29-by-29-character grid and can be read forwards and backwards, horizontally and vertically, diagonally as well as in the color-coded sections.

A simplified version with Chinese abbreviations and the original of Su Hui's palindrome poem Xuanji Tu

During the Qing Dynasty , the character 心 (heart) was added to the center of the poem so that it now includes 841 characters.

Other poems

There are other poems ascribed to Su Hui, but they appear to be from the Ming period.

literature

• Günther Debon: Chinese poetry: history, structure, theory. In: H. Franke (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Orientalistik. Fourth division, China. Second volume: literature. Brill, Leiden 1989, ISSN  0169-9520 , ISBN 90-04-08700-1 , p. 194.
• Eugene Wang: Patterns Above and Within: Picture of the Turning Sphere and Medieval Chinese Astral Imagination. In: Lucille Chia, WL Idema: Books in numbers. seventy-fifth anniversary of the Harvard-Yenching Library. conference papers (= Harvard-Yenching Library studies. No. 8.) Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong 2007, ISBN 978-962-996-331-6 , pp. 49-89. ( books.google.de )
• David Hinton: Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-374-10536-5 .

Web links

Commons : Su Hui  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hinton: p. 105.
2. ↑ Wang: p. 51.
3. ↑ Wang: p. 52.
4. ↑ Wang: pp. 80-81.
5. ^ Hinton: p. 108.

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Su is the family name here, Hui is the first name.