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Comment by vijayr | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the ancient Indian poet whose poems gave one meaning left to right and totally different meaning right to left

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Indeed, Venkatadhvari's 17th century Sanskrit work Raghava Yadaveeyam narrates the story of Ramayana (left-to-right) and Mahabharata (right-to-left) simultaneously.

http://www.sanskritebooks.org/2009/09/raghava-yadaviyam-with...

It's a whole genre actually.*

*http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603

there have been a number of simple examples in modern times -- poems that cycle through a pessimistic statement, a statement like "we will never see the day when", and an optimistic statement, and end with the line "now read from bottom to top" (which makes the middle line negate the pessimistic statement instead of the optimistic one.)

For example, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/weird-news/14yearold-floor...

I always found those super tacky. I wonder if it'll get posted on Hacker News in the year 5015 as an example of brilliant 21st century poetry. I also wonder if Venkatadhvari's contemporaries found him to be tacky.

From a different comment in this discussion:

> They were a whole genre of poems called "adhama kavyas." Literally, in Sanskrit, it means 'inferior poems'.

Pretty Amazing.

They were a whole genre of poems called "adhama kavyas." Literally, in Sanskrit, it means 'inferior poems'. Here's a nice (though a little flowery) exposition on these: https://www.dropbox.com/s/swivmkyr138wd01/14339015-The-wonde...

They were deemed inferior because they were low on traditional poetic quality- meaning, prosody, and language, and high on a sort of acrobatics.

There are fascinating poems, including palindromes, meaningful poems written by repeating the same letter, nested structures, etc.

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