Sidetracks

Sidetracks by the revered Chinese poet Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang, comprises one long poem in 34 cantos tracing the poet’s time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing and his labor during the Cultural Revolution, through his years of exile living in six countries. Dao’s first new collection in nearly 15 years, Sidetracks offers a sweeping account not only of 20th century Chinese history but also of global history, told from the perspective of a refugee whose imaginative sympathy (“I watch the exile of the setting sun in a bronze mirror”) and seamless yoking of the political, cultural, and personal is achieved through breathtaking juxtaposition:

I gaze dazed at Mount Fuji in the distance
heart disease and the Hiroshima bomb
midlife crisis    nowhere for me to flee
bow before the eight directions of the wind—

The aftershocks of dislocation are co-extensive with language for Dao (“a broken line is also the way back home”), who sees “writing as a way to erase line after line of poetry.” Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (among other visionary poets, including Paul Celan, Pablo Neruda, and Tomas Tranströmer) is, for Dao, a poet-in-arms:

O Darwish    you guide me along the track
knocking on the gate of midnight    my torchbearer
white scarf    mother tongue centers the breath

“[W]here is the meaning of literature,” the poet asks, answering his own question by recalling the fear of erasure: “dreams are also dangerous / while Chinese characters centralize power under heaven.” While Sidetracks portrays “the void of a journey without a destination,” and resistance struggle (“all the long nights are doomed expectations / all revolutions are ideals betrayed”), this generation-defining work is also a celebration of poetry’s alterity (“a clenched fist suddenly sets metaphor free”) and its ability to liberate the spirit even amid authoritarian despair. Recounting the story of three imprisoned Chilean poets, Dao writes:

—there’s a wall in front of you    but you must pass
through    that image is a reflection of our world