New York: New Directions Publishing, 1991. É The conclusion demonstrates the poet's firm confidence in our nation.
9"Xuan gao," Bei Dao shixuan (Guangzhou: Xin shiji chubanse, 1988), p. 73; English translation (with some changes) as cited in Bonnie McDougall, "Problems and Possibilities in Translating Contemporary Chinese Literature," The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 25 (1991), 37-67, p. 49. É The conclusion demonstrates the poet's firm confidence in our nation. Thousands of people converged on Tiananmen Square to mourn the death a few months before of Zhou Enlai, the one Politburo member who, it was thought, had tried to moderate Maos policies of instant collectivization and class war. 8On Bei Dao's early reading of translated literature, see his "From The Founding of Today to Today: A Reminiscence," translated by Perry Link, at http://prelectur/lecturers/dao/index.html. His first poem, “The Answer” was published for the first in 1976 and was well received.
(Zhang Yexi and Geng Jianhua, Zhongguo xiandai menglong shi shangxi [Modern and Misty poetry of China, explicated; Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1988], pp. Democracy Wall was painted over and not allowed to resume; those who had advocated dismantling the one-party system, like Wei Jingsheng, were arrested as traitors in foreign employ and put through broadly publicized show trials; Today magazine was closed down and its back stocks confiscated. His actual work on behalf of these groups, though meritorious, was doubtless unnecessary to secure him a place on the list of suspicious characters, since another poem from his earlier period had already escaped from its cage in a book and become public property through endless citation. With its obvious debts to foreign writers such as Lorca, Aleixandre, Mandelstam, Whitman, Eliot, and so on, not to mention its tacit departures from a didactic, top-down cultural style, Misty Poetry was a designated target.8 But the campaigns faded away inconclusively, leaving new poetry more prominent than before. 5See Zhu Xianshu, "Yige teshu de wenxue xianxiang: tan bufen qingnian shiren de chuangzuo" (An unusual literary phenomenon: on the creations of certain young poets, Baihua zhou, 1983, number 6, pp. His writings are acclaimed for their eloquence and subtlety. Zhang's snubbing of the menglong movement as "aestheticized political dissidence" (134) assumes that it could somehow move directly into "meaningful social, political praxis" (to be defined) without constructing the appropriate institutions, among which new models of selfhood, of memory and of art might well be counted. And some poems are handles for grasping a number of experiences: that depends partly on the poem, partly on the experiences. 'A new departure' and the Dipper tell us that the dark night is past, a new day is dawning!
Top of Page || Home Page || Stanford University Libraries || Stanford University. All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge... Recite this poem (upload your own video or voice file). All sorrow lacks tears. Wei Jingshengs group and the circle around Today shared at least one prominent member as wellthe poet Mang Ke. All love is in the heart. His pseudonym Bei Dao literally means "North Island," and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet's provenance from Northern China as well as his typical solitude. Debasement is the password of the base, Nobility the epitaph of the noble. On April 5, 1976, an unforeseen event took place. Corruption protests in Saint-Petersburg. Shabbiness brands the passage of the shabby And loftiness marks the death of the lofty. Zhao Zhenkai, better known as his pen name Bei Dao ("Northen Island") was born in Beijing, August 2nd, 1949. It is a way of reading that comforts our ignorance. ARCHIVES || CALENDAR || 7For a fairly typical discussion see Zhu Xianshu, "Yige teshu de wenxue xianxiang." 'Icy peaks' symbolically indicates the feudal fascist dictatorship of the Gang of Four and their cold crueltyÉ. With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2005. Oh Homework)! For an account of the "Misty Poetry debates," see Jiang Zhenchang, "Zhongguo dalu de menglong shi" (Mainland Chinese Misty Poetry," Dangqian dalu wenxue (Taipei: Wenxun chubanshe, 1988), pp.
HUMANITIES AT STANFORD They are the watchful eyes of future generations.TRANSLATED BY BONNIE S. MCDOUGALL, Let me tell you, world, The new departure and the sparkling Dipper. "9 These lines appeared on banners carried by student groups into Tiananmen Square during the popular movement of April and June, 1989; they were even recited, somewhat inappropriately if you ask me, by the student leader Chai Ling on her successful escape from China. 6'Jintian' Editorial Board, "Zhi duzhe" (To the reader), Jintian 1 (December 1978), pp. The commentator assigned to explicate "An Answer" could do no better than this: The speakers sense of standing at a critical point in history is obvious. LET'S GO and A BOUQUET from: Bei Dao. All past is in a dream. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century by B.S. 127-136. Haikou, Hainan: Nanhai Publishing Company, 2003.Bei Dao. A new conjunction and glimmering stars Adorn the unobstructed sky now; They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
I invite you to look back to mainland Chinese publications from the latter half of the 1970s for a sense of the monotony and fear that can be instilled in a population through such measures as mass campaigns of denunciation, the reduction of acceptable stage performances to a handful of Model Revolutionary Operas, and the patterning of permitted speech to variations on a few dozen quotations from the Little Red Book of the ever-correct, ever-glorious leader. by H. Martin (1986) - In Finnish: Suomeksi Bei Daon runoja on julkaistu mm. Top of Page || Home Page || Stanford University Libraries || Stanford University, 2Wei Jingsheng, "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy" (December 5, 1978), in The Courage to Stand Alone, translated by Kristina M. Torgeson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), pp. See how the gilded sky is covered With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead. Nonetheless, there are some pretty oppressive societies out there. 208-209. 5See Zhu Xianshu, "Yige teshu de wenxue xianxiang: tan bufen qingnian shiren de chuangzuo" (An unusual literary phenomenon: on the creations of certain young poets, Baihua zhou, 1983, number 6, pp. The commentator assigned to explicate "An Answer" could do no better than this: Midnight's Gate, edited by Christopher Mattison, translated by Matthew Fryslie. April 30, 2015. It demands that we reflect in a deliberate, considered manner. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1994. 'A five thousand years' pictogram' suggests that the Chinese nation with its five thousand years of history and tradition has a stubborn power of rebirth, and no difficulties can ever bring it low!
The poetry stands only to gain from being freed from that obsession.
If the sea is destined to breach the dikes. Not believing the traditional way of conceiving the outer world means I believe all these things by other way of define it. Bei Dao is a primary figure among the misty poems and has acted as a catalyst for literal and ideological transformations. HUMANITIES AT STANFORD I don't believe the sky is blue; I don't believe in thunder's echoes; I don't believe that dreams are false; I don't believe that death has no revenge. Thanks for sharing by translation................10+ 4See for example Zhang Xudong: "As the menglong poets evolved at the end of the Cultural Revolution to demand a poetic revolution, they sought what can be termed a political breathing space as well as a social self-assertion handled aestheticallyÉ NowÉ it is easier to confront this ideological valorization and aesthetic investmentÉ Under the specific social, political, and intellectual circumstances during the early 1980s, the ideology of the poetic language was to be conceived and received as ideal in both political and aesthetic termsÉ Whereas in previous stages of Chinese modernism [Western high modernism] stood by as a useful but alien systemÉ in the case of Misty poetry it is the symbolic space in which a collective selfhood is to be constituted in linguistic termsÉ With secularization gaining ground on all fronts [by the middle 1980s], the self-definition of the menglong movement was completed not so much by the poetic working out of its experience in the immediate social sphere, but rather by aesthetic transcendence of it through the construction of 'inner life' as a self-serving institutionÉ.