Bei Dao

City Gate, Open Up is the lyrical autobiography of Chinas legendary poet Bei Dao. Exiled from Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Bei Dao returned to his homeland in 2001 for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his youth had vanished: I was a foreigner in my hometown, he writes. The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions contained in City Gate, Open Up. The poet recalls the Beijing of his youth, from the birth of the Peoples Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution. At the centre of the book are his parents and siblings and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Bei Daos autobiography is a memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. One of the great poets of our time. Michael Hofmann. Intense, elegant and impressionistic. Dwight Garner

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025 A Time Book of the Year 2024 A Financial Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024Sidetracks, Bei Daos 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 poets 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 poets 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 Daos work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exiles condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, "amid languages".

Bei-Dao, sobrenombre de Jen-Gai Zao, uno de los poetas chinos contemporáneos más renombrados, nació en Beijing en 1949. Escribe poesía y novela y sus obras han sido traducidas a más de veinte idiomas en todo el mundo. Se exilio en 1989 despues de la masacre de la plaza de Tien- An Meng. Ha sido candidato al Premio Nobel desde hace años. Paisaje sobre cero recoge cincuenta poemas escritos durante los años del exilio de 1993 a 1996. La traductora, Luisa Chang, es doctora en Filologia por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, profesora del Departamento de Lengua y Literatura Españolas de la Universidad Catolica Fujen de Taiwan. Ha traducido al chino La familia de Pascual Duarte, Viaje a la Alcarria, de Cela; El año de la muerte de Ricardo Reis, de Saramago; Pedro Paramo y El llano en llamas, de Juan Rulfo, etc.