Sidetracks
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A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2024 A 2024 NPR BOOK WE LOVE A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024 Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus--the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. "As a poet, I am always lost," Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life--from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the "sunshine tablecloth" in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation ("the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness"). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the "vortex of experience" and the poet's encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, "Bei Dao's work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exile's condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, 'amid languages.'"
About this Author
Bei Dao, (the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was born in Beijing in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a concrete mixer and blacksmith for eleven years. Forced into exile after the Tiananmen Massacre, he lived in Europe and the US until 2007, then settling in Hong Kong until, only recently, moving back to Beijing. He has been hailed as "the soul of post-Mao poetry" (Yunte Huang) and praised for his "intense lyricism" (Pankaj Mishra). Bei Dao has received numerous awards forhis poetry all over the world, and founded the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. His photography and paintings have been exhibited in China, Hong Kong, and Japan. New Directions publishes ten of his books. Jeffrey Yang is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Line and Light . His translations include Ahmatjan Osman's Uyghurland, The Farthest Exile and Bei Dao's autobiography City Gate, Open Up : "crafted with poetic precision and enriched by Yang's assiduous translation" ( The Wall Street Journal ).
Reviews
"A legend in Chinese poetry and contemporary writing, Bei Dao (the pen name for Zhao Zhenkai) returns to poetry after almost 15 years with Sidetracks, translated by Jeffrey Yang. The book-length poem is a culmination of the work and living he's done since 1989, when he was exiled from China."
"Bei Dao's Sidetracks, translated with cinematic eloquence by Jeffrey Yang, defines the poet's choice of the road less traveled as resistance against both totalitarianism and aesthetic orthodoxy. A leading figure of meng long shi - or "misty," "no direction home" poetry - who galvanized the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China, Bei Dao employs paradox and parataxis to portray his misguided Red Guard youth as "prisoner of the lost road" and the time lost via exile and regained via the poetic imagination."
"More than a decade in the making, this book-length poem traces its acclaimed author's years in exile after his expulsion from mainland China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. Dotted with dates and locations of personal and historical significance--as well as encounters with friends and peers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Mahmoud Darwish--the poem combines the documentary and the elusive, finding meaning in language both when it 'talks with the tanks' and when it captures the 'sunshine tablecloth' in a California kitchen. Elegantly rendered into English, the poem exemplifies Bei Dao's surprising imagery and logic while also introducing an autobiographical immediacy to his work."
"The Chinese poet 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."
"Bei Dao's poems are intense, elegant, and impressionistic. A dream-like push and flow."
"Bei Dao has always warned against interpreting his works politically, but the unmistakable messages of rebellion in his verses resonated with my college peers when we massed in Tiananmen Square in 1989."
"Alternately gnomic and laconic, these poems of motion are a forceful accomplishment, yoking together lyric and epic to narrate one man's journey and to propose an expansive idea of history."
"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."
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