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Poems by Bei Dao
Bei Dao
Translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man Cheong
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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Leaving Home
The compass jokingly
points toward a state of mind
you drink up the soup and leave
this scene of life
on the application form of
sky and electric wires, a tree
trembling to fly
so what can it write about?
no matter what happens, you’ll
recognize the danger
a crowd of strangers sitting
at journey’s end
at night the wind steals bells
the long-haired bride
quivers like a bowstring
over the body of the groom
Translated by
Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong
The sixth collection by China’s foremost contemporary poet, Bei Dao, was greeted as perhaps his finest on its publication in America. The 49 poems were written in the USA, and have been translated into English by Eliot Weinberger (the distinguished essayist and translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges) in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and with Bei Dao himself. Saturated with startling, surreal imagery and oblique political references, this book shows the restless development in style which is the hallmark of the authentically innovative poet.
Maria Crawford, Financial Times
'This beautiful, harrowing, frequently astonishing and unsettling long poem, eleven years in the making, succeeding and deepening a prodigious body of accomplished earlier work, is ample evidence that the Nobel Prize for Bei Dao is surely somewhat overdue.'
Stuart Walton, Hong Kong Review of Books
'A lyrical masterpiece.'
Carol Muske-Dukes
'Bei Dao is among the strongest poetic impressions of my lifetime. To me, his poems are the work of a genius, a genius of juxtaposing, of simplicity, of acceleration, of tunneling through emblem and image.'
Michael Hofmann
'As with stereograms (magic-eye art), if we look at them long enough, a three-dimensional view of Bei Dao's itinerant life in exile comes in and out of focus. From Beijing to West Berlin, Copenhagen to Hong Kong, the narrative thrust of this collection zigzags through his lifetime, while the 34 cantos themselves (in Jeffrey Yang's propulsive translation) are a nebula of worldly experience.'
Jack Hargreaves, China Book Review
'The language of Bei Dao's memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poet Yang, is elegantly simple and guilelessly accessible....Winter white cabbage, vinyl records, pet rabbits, banned books, and first and last 'I love yous' provide intimate glimpses that 'open up' to reveal extraordinary, immediate testimony of challenges survived in a life intensely lived.'
Booklist of City Gate, Open Up (US edition, published by New Directions) 'This is a nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young man's eyes. Since that young man became a poet, it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scents of a Beijing that is no more.'
Publishers Weekly of City Gate, Open Up (US edition, published by New Directions)
