Sidetracks: Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang

This week' blog is by Jeffrey Yang, translator of Bei Dao's Sidetracks which is published this month! Use the code JULYBOOKS for 20% off and free UK P&P!

Bei Dao recalls the initial spark for Sidetracks in his afterword to the book: “I remember twenty years ago walking with Li Tuo at the Berkeley Pier. The morning mist was thick that day and a fog-bell rang out. I said, ‘Fog-bell, that’s a nice word—could be borrowed for a poem.’ Li Tuo nodded and replied, ‘You should write a long poem, something with a sense of history.’ Bei Dao wouldn’t start writing his long poem until 2010, three years after leaving the US to accept a teaching position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and “so many years of living in exile turned into a relatively stable situation.” He finished it eleven years later in 2021. 

Sidetracks is Bei Dao’s lyric distillation of his post-1989 wandering as a political exile. Personal history intermingles with national histories, intermingles with encounters with other poets and artists (many also exiled from China), family and friends, strangers and apparitions, who have crossed paths with Bei Dao along the sidetracks. Memories of his experiences as a blacksmith and concrete worker through the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s seep into the eternal present of the poem, along with tributes to poets, from Du Fu to Marina Tsvetaeva to Mahmoud Darwish, whose footsteps guide him. But while the impulse of the book is autobiographical, it is not a memoir in the way, say, James Laughlin’s Byways is a memoir in verse. Autobiographical details might shape the trajectory of the long poem, but these details are montaged with philosophical, allegorical, hermetic, existential, oneiric turns where, as Michael Palmer once wrote in the preface to Bei Dao’s collection At the Sky’s Edge, “the subject multiplies, divides, disappears into the ‘wound of narration.’” Questions proliferate against the uncertainties of the world.

How does one write about the condition of forced exile that stretches on day after day through the years? The sixth poem opens in  mythic, mysterious imagery, then cuts to Oslo, where the poet is a guest and “where all news turns into old snow,” cuts to dinner with an exiled friend, cuts to Grieg, cuts to a ski trip, cuts to a different dinner with another exiled Chinese poet, cuts to a dream of Beijing, cuts to news of the Berlin Wall on TV in a student dorm, cuts to the Oslo airport, saying farewell to friends, friends who will help him continue to publish the pioneering literary magazine Today. It ends where exile has just begun: 

my fist lengthens into a sledgehammer

tosses and turns on the anvil of insomnia

the driving storm expands the bellows

stars ignite the gunpowder night—

Bei Dao currently lives between Hong Kong and the Mainland, though the Chinese government still finds his poetry troubling. The original edition of Sidetracks was already set and ready to print by Oxford University Press, his longtime publisher in Hong Kong, but official pressure led to delays and eventual termination of the planned publication after the added assessment of a sample of the English translation. Instead, Bei Dao’s editor at OUP, Lam To Kwan, published the book himself in 2022, while a separate edition was published in Taiwan the following year. 

One note about the title of the book 《歧路行》(qilu xing). A literal translation of the original would be something like “walking divergent paths,” or “walking the crossroads/branching roads,” or simply “divergent journey.” A friend of Bei Dao’s thought I should translate the title as “The Roads Taken,” to echo Robert Frost’s famous poem while referring to the many travels of the poet to different parts of the world. While this title would be in line with the original meaning, it felt a bit too emphatic and misleading in its allusion to Frost’s work, which formalistically and culturally has very little to do with Bei Dao’s poetry. The various resonances of “sidetracks,” its compound sound, whiffs of music and traces in the earth, its aleatory implications, felt like the necessary spur for me.