I have to admit that I’ve often been baffled by Bei Dao‘s poems. It is impossible not to admire his biography, but his poetry—”misty” in Chinese—strikes me as cryptic in English. I’m not saying that his primary translators, Bonnie S. McDougall and David Hinton, haven’t done good work; I’ve always felt that the difficulties lay in Bei Dao’s work itself, and in the cultural/political context which no introductory remarks or footnotes, however assiduous, can provide. Yet I’ve found myself rereading the poems off and on over the years; whenever the shelves of my library get so laden that I start worrying about the structural integrity of our house walls, a situation that results in my culling the collection, it never crosses my mind to let go of Bei Dao. And when the indispensable Black Widow Press announced the publication of new translations of Bei Dao, done by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein, I ordered a copy right away. Endure turned out to be fresh versions of already published poems—but it’s well worth picking up, because Eshleman and Klein succeed in carrying Bei Dao’s poems a considerable distance toward English that is not cryptic, but “misty,” as it should be.
Here are a couple of examples:
FEBRUARY
The night is rushing to perfection
I drift inside language
the musical instruments of death
are filled with icewho sings on the crevice
of days, water turns bitter
flames hemorrhage
pouncing like pumas to the stars
there must be form
for there to be dreamsin the chill of early morning
a wide-awake bird
gets closer to the truth
while my poems and I
sink as oneFebruary in books:
certain movements certain shadows*
INSOMNIA
You are outside your window looking at your
whole life’s fluctuating beamseyes blinded out of jealousy
stars take off against the wind
surpassing death’s metaphor
unfolding morality’s landscapeat that place called Wellspring
the night finally catches up to you
its insomniac army
salutes the flag of solitudepassing over many lands the night watchman
illuminates the flowers of panic
a cat leaps into the long night
dream tail flashing once
There’s a worthy ambiguity at work here, it seems to me, and a “misty” coherence that deserves all the openness we can offer it.
I should add that Eshleman and Klein append a wonderful essay, “Translating Bei Dao’s ‘Untitled’: A Hundred Thousand Windows Shimmer,” consisting of letters between the two translators as they wrestle one Bei Dao’s poems into English. Reading it inspires a new appreciation for translation, for Bei Dao, for the Chinese and English languages, and for the persistence of the translators. In fact, it made me wonder how any individual translator can ever hope to capture the nuances of a poet like Bei Dao!