時間的玫瑰

by Bei Dao

in the mirror there is always this momentthis moment leads to the door of rebirththe door opens to the seathe rose of time Bei Dao The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China s most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao s entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages.

Genres: Poetry, China, Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Name in Chinese: 北岛

Bei Dao ("Northern Island") is another name for Zhifu Island.
Bei Dao literally "Northern Island", born August 2, 1949) is the pen name of Chinese poet Zhao Zhenkai. He was born in Beijing. He chose the pen name because he came from the north and because of his preference for solitude. Bei Dao is the most notable representative of the Misty Poets, a group of Chinese poets who reacted against the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution.

As a teenager, Bei Dao was a member of the Red Guards, the enthusiastic followers of Mao Zedong who enforced the dictates of the Cultural Revolution, often through violent means. He had misgivings about the Revolution and was "re-educated" as a construction worker, from 1969 to 1980.[5] Bei Dao and Mang Ke founded the magazine Jintian[6] (Today), the central publication of the Misty Poets, which was published from 1978 until 1980, when it was banned. The work of the Misty Poets and Bei Dao in particular were an inspiration to pro-democracy movements in China. Most notable was his poem "Huida" ("The Answer") which was written during the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations in which he participated. The poem was taken up as a defiant anthem of the pro-democracy movement and appeared on posters during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. During the 1989 protests and subsequent shootings, Bei Dao was at a literary conference in Berlin and was not allowed to return to China until 2006. (Three other leading Misty Poets — Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian — were also exiled.) His then wife, Shao Fei, and their daughter were not allowed to leave China to join him for another six years.

Since 1987, Bei Dao has lived and taught in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and the United States. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, including five poetry volumes in English[7] along with the story collection Waves (1990) and the essay collections Blue House (2000) and Midnight's Gate (2005). Bei Dao continued his work in exile. His work has been included in anthologies such as The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution (1990)[8] and Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese poetry.[9]

Bei Dao has won numerous awards, including the Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN, International Poetry Argana Award from the House of Poetry in Morocco and the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jintian was resurrected in Stockholm in 1990 as a forum for expatriate Chinese writers. He has taught and lectured at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Beloit College, Wisconsin, and is Professor of Humanities in the Center for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The wave of that year
flooded the sands on the mirror
to be lost is a kind of leaving
and the meaning of leaving
the instant when all languages
are like shadows cast from the west

life's only a promise
don't grieve for it
before the garden was destroyed
we had too much time
debating the implications of a bird flying
as we knocked down midnight's door

alone like a match polished into light
when childhood's tunnel
led to a vein of dubious ore
to be lost is a kind of leaving
and poetry rectifying life
rectifies poetry's echo

- - -

Ah, my beloved land
Why don't you sing any more
Can it be true that even the ropes of the Yellow River
towmen
Like sundered lute-strings
Reverberate no more
True that time, this dark mirror
Has also turned its back on you forever
Leaving only stars and drifting clouds behind

I look for you
In every dream
Every foggy night or morning
I look for spring and apple trees
Every wisp of breeze stirred up by honey bees
I look for the seashore's ebb and flow
The seagulls formed from sunlight on the waves
I look for the stories built into the wall
Your forgotten name and mine

If fresh blood could make you fertile
The ripened fruit
On tomorrow's branches
Would bear my colour

- - -

The wind is intimate with love
summer shimmers with imperial colors
someone fishing lonesomely measures
the earth’s wounds
the chiming clock is swelling
those of you strolling through the afternoon
please join in the meaning of the age

some people bow to a piano
others carry a ladder by
sleepiness has been checked for a few minutes
only a few minutes
the sun is researching the shadow
I quaff water from a bright mirror
and spot the enemy in my mind’s eye

the tenor’s singing
enrages the sea like an oil tanker
at 3 A.M. I open a can
releasing those fish into the light

[moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started off by reading his poems in my IB literature class and at first thought of him as pretentious poet who makes things more abstract and complex than it is needed. However, upon reading more of his pieces and analyzing them for my literature class i got to uncover his complexity and found myself searching and reading through more of his poems. I asked my teacher for a copy of his collection and read through all of it. Though it is often a pain in the ass to analyze, dissecting Bei Dao’s poetry is one of the best aspects of his work in my opinion. There are so many layers to his poetry that once you uncover the meaning everything starts making sense and every single element of his poetry makes this beautiful story that no one could have ever come up with. Misty poetry like his is challenging but extremely rewarding. I recommend this highly to people who want a challenge!

[Paul Stubbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as Hölderlin through his writings wanted to make ‘disappear’ the ‘divisions in which we think and exist’, so too in the poetry of Bei Dao we experience consciousness again as a hypothesis; a new world problem to solve through the regeneration of language. From poem to poem a battle is fought between image and word upon the coterminous continents of his imagination as, like a poetical glass-blower, Bei Dao breathes new eternal shapes into words. To Western twenty-first-century eyes, his poems may appear born of the American ‘Imagist’ or ‘Objectivist’ schools, but they are in fact new concentrated structures of his own Chinese language—elliptical and oneiric images turning over the lathe of the planet. This selection by New Directions brings together, for the first time, five previous collections translated into English, beginning with The August Sleepwalker, in which we encounter the early work, much of which initially appeared in the influential underground journal that Bei Dao co-founded in 1978, Today (or Jintian). The journal was banned after two years, but not before his name, and poetry, had been spread widely.

http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2...

[Jean Bowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

 
Bei Dao's poetry (in translation at least) has the same airiness and almost fragmented quality of a Hakui and reminds me of imagist poetry. So many of his poems were inscrutable to me, others more accessible but still cryptic. It didn't matter; I couldn't stop reading either way- they were all hypnotic:

Reading History

hostile dew in an uprising of plum blossoms
guards the darkness etched by the noon sword
a revolution begins the following morning
the bitterness of the widows cuts through the tundra like a pack of wolves

on account of the prophecies the ancestors are moving backward
into that river of the furious debates of faith and desire
that never end, only a hermit swirl
leans another silence of meditation

go up to see the sunset of kingship
when civilization and flute songs float off in an empty valley
the seasons stand up in the ruins
fruits climb over the walls to chase tomorrow

or

Swivel Chair

I walk out of a room
like a shadow from a music box
the rump of the sun sways
stopping dead at noon

empty empty swivel chair
in the funnel of writing
someone filters through the white paper:
wrinkled face
sinister words

in regard to enduring freedom
in regard to can I have a light

the heart, as if illuminating
even more of the blind
shuttles between day and night

While reading Dao I was reminded of Luoise Gluck's thought's on art: "What is wanted in art is to harness the power of the unfinished. to create a whole that does not lose the dynamic presence of what remains incomplete." Bei Dao isn't going to finish it for you, he's not going to hold your hand, he's going to throw you in where you can swim, float and hopefully not drown.

I know nothing of Chinese language but still I did appreciate this bilingual edition with the mysterious, layered Chinese characters on one side and the linear English on the other. It had a centering effect.

The preface alone was worth the read. Bei Dao began the "misty poet" movement during the Chinese cultural revolution. When the revolution began, all the schools closed. he and his siblings had to go through "re-education through labor" assignments and his parents had to undergo "ideological thought reform." Bei Dao spent five years as a concrete mixer and six as a blacksmith. he writes in the preface, "It was under those harsh circumstances of life that I began my creative writing. I finished the first draft of a novella, Waves in a darkroom, while supposedly developing photos for a propaganda exhibition about the construction site. That was one of the grimmest periods of contemporary China, when reading and writing were forbidden games. But underground creative writing was breaking through the frozen shell of the earth." and later, " I realize that a poet and a blacksmith are much alike: both of them chase after a perfect dream that is unrealizable. I once, in an early poem. wrote the lines: "freedom is nothing but the distance/ between the hunter and the hunted." It is the predicament, as well, of writing poetry: when you are hunting poetry, it turns out that you are hunted by poetry. In this sense, you are both hunter and hunted, but poetry is the distance like freedom."

[CM · Rating 2 out of 5]

It may have been marketed as an introductory text to 9 important European poets in the 19th or 20th century, written by a highly regarded Chinese poet/scholar, but for those not already well versed in the subject matter (I only knew Rilke and a bit of Pasternak) , this ambitious tome covering the comparison of multiple Chinese translations of the same poems, appreciation of poems, biography of the poets, and the author's own experience with these poems can be more than a bit demanding. It sometimes feels like a book written with other poets/literary scholars in mind...

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

SINCE I OFTEN mention how much I admire James Joyce, I am occasionally asked whether I have read Finnegans Wake. I don’t know whether I have, actually. I looked at every word on every page in serial left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which means I “read” the book in some narrow sense…but did I take it in, grasp it, comprehend it, have some flickering glimmer of what was being narrated? Well, no, not so much. So I have both read and not read Finnegans Wake.

I feel that I have also both read and not read The Rose of Time. Most of the time, I would read the poem’s three or four stanzas, read it again, and read it again, and still draw a blank.

this sky unexceptional at chess

watches the sea change color

a ladder goes deep into the mirror

fingers in a school for the blind

touch the extinction of birds

(“Another”)

Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was one of a group of poets attacked by the state as “menglong,” sometimes translated “misty,” essentially meaning “obscure,” with dismissive connotation. Nonetheless, he was embraced by a broad readership in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of generational spokesman figure. He was abroad when Tiananmen Square happened and decided to stay abroad, but he remains widely read and revered in China.

All of which makes sense for me, I have to say, because Bob Dylan means a lot to me, and the Dylan songs that most affected me, that shaped my sensibility I would even say, are almost perfectly opaque. “Visions of Johanna” may be my favorite song; it seems to put its finger precisely on the spot. And yet do I have any idea why lines like “the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes” or “harmonicas play skeleton keys in the rain” seem so meaningful? I do not.

“Bei Dao” and “Bob Dylan” even have the same initials, in our writing system.

So I loved the book even though I did not understand much of it, since I could read “keyword my shadow / hammers dreamworld iron / stepping to that rhythm / a lone wolf walks into” and imagine thousands in China thinking, “Damn, he nailed it again.”

[boocia]

delightful, really good. poems aside i just think this is a cool book; each poem has it in the original chinese + a translation. a cool way to pick up a little chinese. though i'm totally unqualified to say i feel i wasn't quite as much of a fan of the translation moves being made in the poems from "Unlock" and "The Rose of Time"; but i get the feeling Bei Dao himself was just making more modernist or radical or modern moves that are harder to translate anyway.

anyway the chinese language is so beautifully concise, and rhythmic, and almost melancholically declarative, in this context. is what i took away from it. by virtue of being a wide retrospective i feel the poems ran into each other a bit; the holistic vibes i got were sort of wistfullness, maybe acceptance or a reckoning, about time (of course). motifs are the naming of months, the changing of seasons, recollecting youth and other memories as times that have passed. i feel there's something about trying to make sense of the present when so much has happened before. it is annoying to psychologize but it musta been crazy to be a firebrand revolutionary poet in yr 20s, work w activists who were persecuted, executed, and exiled, and then live in exile and just like, vibe/teach/have a career afterward; while the revolutionary moment was repressed.

the poems all had this elusive quality in poems, of being sort of obscure and orthogonal but in a way that makes u Want to re-read to make more sense of it, and be rewarded for that instead of just bouncing off of them.

excited to revisit this in a few years.

[Luckytky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bei Dao's poems, to quote The New York Times, "carry the pure emotional freight of the heart". They are astonishingly beautiful.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some truly incredible poems, alongside some truly inscrutable ones.

[Wen · Rating 4 out of 5]

虽然不是那么喜欢北岛的诗了

[pozharvgolovu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry book in bilingual edition is a must read for anyone who's interested in Oriental poetry or Non-western poetry. Although it reminded me of haikai tradition--and I might be misunderstanding the collection due to a lack knowledge--poems are wonderful. Well written, with a good rhythm, variety of topics, albeit the oppression of political regimes is present.
I will quote the last lines of "The Rose of Time" to end this review because it sums up pretty well the whole idea of a poetry book:
"In the mirror there is always this moment/ this moment leads to the doors of rebirth/ the door opens to the sea/ the rose of time" (281). Poetry is somehow a door open to vastness.

[Alexandra Mergen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though I am only able to read these poems in the English translation, I appreciate having a bilingual edition to look at lines and stanzas. The English versions are beautiful poems. The author's thoughtful introduction deepens the experience of reading the poems. This book is a great reminder of how much poetry matters.

[Peter Prokopiev · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading Bei Dao was an almost painful experience.
It has been a while since I last read someone who is that solipsistic (even Michael Palmer wasn't as atrocious).
Bei Dao is also, and I say this because I just learned the word today, an agelast, and agelasts I cannot stand.