Forms of Distance
By Bei Dao
Translated by David Hinton
New Directions, 87 pages, $14.95
“History has finally given our generation the chance to sing out what has been buried in us for more than ten years.” So declared the first issue of the samizdat Chinese literary journal Today during the 1979 “Democracy Wall” movement, the first of China’s periodic political “openings” after the Cultural Revolution.
In the 1980 crackdown (completing a cycle that is by now too familiar), Today was forced to stop publication. But in the 14 years since, the journal’s chief editor, the poet Bei Dao, has become an underground hero in China-less for his overt political activity than for his insistence on a personal and sometimes opaque form of poetic expression in spite of an official culture that values conformity and transparency.
His safety in China endangered since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Bei Dao has spent the last several years in exile in Europe and the United States. He has received growing attention in literary circles in this country since the translation and publication in 1990 of “The August Sleepwalker,” a lengthy collection of his poetry, and “Waves,” a book of short stories. “Old Snow,” a shorter volume of poems, was published by New Directions in 1991.
“Forms of Distance,” the third volume of Bei Dao’s poetry to appear in English, continues in the ironic, allusive vein of the earlier collections. Bei Dao’s refusal to embrace social realist aesthetics led Chinese authorities to apply the pejorative label “Misty poet” to him and several of his contemporaries, a label the group accepted as a badge of honor.
Never merely polemical, both Bei Dao’s genius and his menace consist in a seamless merging of metaphor and politics; his is a guerrilla battle fought at the level of language. In the poem entitled “A State of War,” we can never be sure which voice, poet or soldier, is speaking:
“mercenary weeds captured mountain valleys/ blossoms casually detonate, trees smoke/ I lie behind song/ firing into cheery flocks of birds”
“Forms of Distance” takes aim at a wider variety of targets than the earlier collections, combating a range of human folly that extends far beyond the boundaries of mainland China. In “Advertising” Bei Dao strikes a new note with his commentary on commercialism-“this climate of king-size price reductions”-and media culture-“a dictator freshly elected by the newspapers/ waves warm greetings from a crack through the city”.
But some of the most biting lines in the collection seem directed at least partly at Bei Dao himself, especially as he considers his role as “dissident.” “A New Century,” for example, seems to allude to the paradoxical status of the persecuted-writer-turned-celebrity:
“solid gold bombs detonate/ and we’re glad to be victims/ showing our wounds to the others”
If, as some expect, Bei Dao eventually receives a Nobel Prize for literature, he will join a string of Nobel laureates who have transformed social and political repression into poetic capital. Ironically, some of the 20th Century’s most oppressive political systems have generated (or at least catalyzed) much of its best literature. Like Quasimodo and Montale, the Italian Nobelists whose densely woven “hermetic” poetry was widely perceived as a form of stylistic resistance to fascism, Bei Dao and his fellow “misty” poets stand to benefit from their pariah status in official China.
Such ironies do not elude the author of “Forms of Distance.” The volume takes its title from a line in “A Local Accent,” a poem that conveys some of the poet’s ambivalence about his status as celebrity exile. Because Bei Dao has spent the last several years living in a number of European countries as well as the U.S., his experience is no longer that of a native poet but of an exiled “dissident,” looking in from the outside:
“the world’s agents of freedom/ entered me into their giant computer:/ an alien voice sneaking into the dictionary/ a dissident/ perhaps a form of distance from the world”
The near homophony of “dissident” and “distance” may be a happy coincidence of the English language, but it crystallizes the poet’s thought perfectly, perhaps better than the original. A single word in the translation’s “alien voice” conveys what it takes eight characters (roughly: “one who holds different political opinions”) to say in Chinese. Forced by history into a new and uncomfortable role, separated from his family and country, Bei Dao becomes something for which his own language has no word.
David Hinton’s translations are crisp, readable and at times inspired. Because Hinton is best known for his English versions of classical Chinese poets such as Tu Fu and T’ao Ch’ien, it isn’t surprising that he draws a comparison in his “Translator’s Note” between Bei Dao and the old masters. But the comparison says more about Hinton than about Bei Dao, whose bafflement in “Asking the Sky” (“memorizing ancient poems as a child/ I couldn’t see what they meant”) is hardly unique among readers of China’s notoriously opaque classical tradition.
The rapid-fire succession of images in Bei Dao’s poetry isn’t classical as much as it is cinematic-more Fellini than Li Po. Where the classical poets depend heavily on subtle manipulations of conventional patterns of sound and poetic form, nearly impossible to render well in translation, Bei Dao’s rhythms are intensely visual, a kind of poetic montage:
“after words slide beyond the book/ the white page is pure amnesia/ I wash my hands clean/ and tear it apart, the rain stops”
“Forms of Distance” places a new emphasis on the methods, aims and experiences of poetry itself. Such discussions of craft can easily lead less mature poets to become hollowly self-reflexive, but Bei Dao’s lyrics never lose sight of their objective. “Midnight Singer,” for example, slips in and out of a classical idiom to make a point about poetry, modernity and change:
“a song/ is a mirror that knows the body by heart/ is the emperor of memory/ is the waxen tongue/ flame of talk/ is the flower garden nurtured by myth/ is a steam locomotive/ bursting into the church”
Unlike so much contemporary poetry, which seems increasingly convinced of its own obsolescence, poems like this one are distinctly alive. They do more than observe; they participate in the historical transformations they describe. In any language, this is poetry of a high order. And it is vintage Bei Dao.
