Bei Dao – författare

At the Sky's Edge combines in a single bilingual paperback volume two essential works by one of the world's finest contemporary poets. In his first retrospective volume of poetry in English, two of Bei Dao's previous booksForms of Distance (1994) and Landscape Over Zero (1996)are gathered together in one bilingual paperback edition. At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989. Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the US. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's seventh book published by New Directions and is the first time Forms of Distance appears in a paperback edition. The translations of David Hinton, who was awarded the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets in 1997, capture both the musicality and density of the original Chinese. Quiet, spare, these are poems of paradox and possibility, of words carefully balanced, of a world on edge.

A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2024A 2024 NPR BOOK WE LOVEA NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZESidetracks, 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.’”

Forms of Distance is Bei Dao’s second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, Old Snow, as ‘the work of one of the great poets of our time’, and John Cayley wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that ‘in a sense he is the only contemporary Chinese poet who is knowable for the non-specialist … we can hear the maturing poetic voice of a highly talented, individual Chinese writer.’

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025A Time Book of the Year 2024A Financial Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in fifteen years, is also his first long poem and undoubtedly his magnum opus - the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. 'As a poet, I am always lost,' he once declared. Opening Sidetracks with a prologue of heavenly questions and following on with thirty-four cantos, the poem travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life. From his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, the poem roves 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'). The various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the 'vortex of experience' and the poet's encounters with friends, strangers and with other artists living and dead. He moves from place to place unable to return home.As the poet Michael Palmer 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".'

Bei Dao är en av de främsta diktarna under tiden efter Mao, känd som ledande inom den grupp som kallas "de dunkla" poeterna. Nu publiceras ett urval av hans dikter i nyöversättning av Göran Sommardal.

This book is an anthology of the poems written by fourteen poets hailing from Albania, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the United States, and the Great China regions of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The poets will assemble in Hong Kong in November 2009 in a gala celebration of poetry and recitation - International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, the biggest and first such gathering in the territory's history. The poems, selected by the poets themselves, are published in their original languages as well as Chinese and English.