Sidetracks

Sidetracks, 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, pen name of Zhao Zhenkai, was born in Beijing in 1949. Hailed as 'the soul of post-Mao poetry' (Yunte Huang) and praised for his 'intense lyricism' (Pankaj Mishra), Bei Dao is one of contemporary China's most distinguished poets and the cofounder of the landmark underground literary journal Jintian (Today). He has received numerous international awards for his work, including the Cikada Prize in Sweden, the Golden Wreath Award in Macedonia, the Aragana Poetry Prize in Morocco, the Jeanette Schocken Literary Prize in Germany, the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, and the 2nd Yakamochi Medal in Japan; he is also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 2007 he has been the Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and currently resides between Hong Kong and Beijing. He acquired U.S. citizenship in 2009. New Directions publishes ten of his books, most recently his autobiography City Gate, Open Up. Bei Dao's poetry has been translated into over thirty languages.