New+Songs+from+the+Jade+Terrace

=New Songs from the Jade Terrace=


 * New Songs from the Jade Terrace** (Traditional Chinese: 玉臺新詠; Simplified Chinese: 玉台新咏; pinyin: Yùtái Xīnyǒng) is a collection of Chinese poetry dating to the time of the Six Dynasties. Its poems have frequently been translated and have otherwise been of great artistic influence around the world. Although there is uncertainty about the authorship of the individual poems, the anthology was compiled by Xu Ling (Chinese: 徐陵; pinyin: Xú Líng), a Southern Dynasties writer who lived from 507 to 583. The "Jade Terrace" is a reference to the luxurious palace apartments to which upper-class women were often relegated, although Burton Watson adds that may also "mean a mirror stand of jade such as women use in their toilet; and since the Chinese are fond of elegant euphemisms for parts of the body, it may even have some more esoteric connotation." //New Songs from a Jade Terrace// is an important collection of Chinese poetry, in part because of the individual poems which it contains, but also because the overall theme of the collection remarkably involves the discussion of sex and gender roles and ideals of love and beauty.

The collection
//New Songs from a Jade Terrace// is divided into ten sections, and 769 chapters "devoted almost entirely to poems about love," that is, the primary emphasis is upon male-female love in the context of the women's apartments, and contains material ranging from anonymous Han Dynasty ballads through poems contemporary to the time of composition.